Exploitation of Energy Performance Certificate Database in Urban Energy Modelling

Cities are crucial for the energy transition, as recognized by the European Union in policies such as the Fit for 55 package and the Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities mission. The former calls for the revision of several directives, among which the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) plays a major role, targeting the phasing out of fossil fuels and the achievement of minimum performance objectives for all existing buildings. It reinforced the role of the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) as a shared evaluation schema. However, considering the 30-50% coverage of EPCs in the European building stock, new methodologies and models are required to assess the building stock extensively. Considering the valuable data contained in EPCs, these can be used to train Urban Building Energy Models which leverage the potential of Earth Observation. This study proposes a new method to segment the building stock according to thermographic pictures, resorting to EPC information for the energy class distribution analysis. Thermographic values are used to assess thermal losses and replicate the energy class distribution accordingly. Different EPC data are assessed in order to understand the best configuration both in terms of share between training and validation data and of the need for potential pre-filtering. The method appears to be reliable – with 66% of buildings classified correctly on average – yet simple, thus being attractive for policymakers to define retrofitting campaigns able to meet European requirements. With simplicity and flexibility being the main strengths of the method, it is also possible to consider additional inputs and make the model more complex to improve the accuracy.