High resolution energy simulations at city scale

The use of transient computer simulations (e.g. TRNSYS, EnergyPlus) for quantifying energy use of individual buildings is now standard in both research and industry. However, their use has been computationally prohibitive at larger scales, in the context of thousands or millions of buildings. Furthermore, physical and thermodynamic properties of buildings are often hard to translate into energy models at urban scale. As a result, city-scale analyses of the built environment, even when bottom-up, have to neglect or simplify dynamic and transient features of buildings. Yet, it is often that time-varying features (concurrence of peak energy demand) and dynamically interacting components (diurnal heat storage) yield the most economically achievable energy efficiencies. This paper describes an automated process of extracting information from high-resolution mapping databases to derive individual building gemeotries for energy modelling. Ongoing work constitutes refinement of model parameters and design of validation for such city- scale models.