Urban building energy modeling from geo-referenced energy performance certificate data: Development, calibration, and validation

Urban building energy models (UBEMs) are considered as applicable tools for urban energy planning. Model developers use different strategies to simulate urban building energy use appropriately, and yet they are often doing so in the absence of high-quality data. While data collection is challenging in many cases, in Sweden, the availability of national databases is relatively good and is expected to facilitate the modeling procedure considerably. This study aims to develop, calibrate and validate an UBEM using available national data, including GIS-based property maps and energy performance certificates (EPCs). The developed UBEM offers an automated framework for constructing simple building-level models from open data and conducting energy simulations in EnergyPlus. The developed UBEM was calibrated and validated for two case study cities in Sweden, Borlange and Uppsala, where the mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) between simulated results and EPC data was 26% and 22%, respectively. Furthermore, a downward trend was observed in the MAPE with increasing spatial aggregation from building to district and city levels (from 26% to 21% and 10%), which highlights the performance of the UBEM in this study to support accurate urban-scale energy analyses for buildings.