A Typical Buildings Approach to Modelling Urban Energy Systems

Physics-based Urban-scale Building Energy Models (UBEMs) are used to model the energy and environmental performance of buildings and the energy services that connect them at urban scales, such as neighbourhoods, districts, and cities. Detailed UBEMs are needed to support the transition towards a renewable energy-based energy system. Current modelling approaches, allow rapid generation of UBEMs with simple geometries from readily available data. However, the resultant models bear little resemblance to the real individual buildings or neighbourhoods, and how they are used, leading to unrealistic and low-accuracy predictions of building performance. Conversely, realistic multi-zonal models of individual buildings in a neighbourhood can be produced using manually created Building Energy Models (BEMs), but at the expense of considerable time, effort, and data. Currently, the use of detailed BEMs is not viable at urban scales. This paper outlines a ‘Typical’ Buildings (TB) approach for producing detailed physics-based UBEMs. The approach uses a library of typical highly detailed multi-zoned BEMs, based on real buildings, and a set of Typological Profiles (TP) that describe different household-user types. Real neighbourhoods are represented by assigning the most representative TBs and TPs to each building and then scaling models, where necessary, to account for known differences between real buildings and the typical buildings assigned to represent them. This method may be used to create UBEMs at any scale, thus combining the accuracy of highly detailed BEM with the reduced modelling effort and data requirements of other large-scale UBEM approaches.