Building Stock Modelling - A novel instrument for urban energy planning in the context of climate change

Paper in proceeding, 2016

Cities and their building stock represent one of the largest energy consumer groups and emitters of greenhouse gases (GHG). The urban building stock, including commercial buildings, offers a large and mostly untapped potential for energy efficiency improvement and GHG mitigation. Urban development, building stock alterations, and building technology measures therefore play a major role in setting the framework to exploit these potentials. A way to describe possible building stock development pathways is through building stock modelling. Although there have been many different bottom-up approaches that model energy demand and GHG emissions as well as other aspects of urban development, they have not been fully integrated and are not giving community energy planners, urban planners and decision makers enough information to influence the development in specific areas and technological fields. The building stock model presented in this paper gives the possibility to model energy supply and demand of both the residential and non-residential building stock at the scale of individual buildings, taking into account both heating and cooling demand (and other energy services) of buildings of various types and age classes. The model allows for tapping into spatially differentiated potentials and to balance demand and supply and renewable energy source (RES) potentials at a local scale (typically small-scale neighbourhoods and hectares) to guide the planning and development of sustainable cities. It is shown that commercial buildings in particular play a key role in initiating thermal energy network approaches (e.g. local low-temperature networks). Furthermore, the possibility to connect with other models e.g. through the Smart Urban Adapt (SUA) modelling platform, makes it possible to run a fully integrated, bottom-up simulation of different urban development scenarios and their impact on energy demand and GHG emissions taking into account all aspects of urban development. The SUA modelling platform provides a highly integrated model, taking into account energy, land use and urban design, in order to investigate the socio-economic drivers of energy consumption. The results of a concrete case study revealed the benefit of integrating energy efficient commercial buildings with district energy systems that allow for tapping local potentials of renewable energy sources, for both heating and cooling.