DEFINING A METHODOLOGY TO INTEGRATE ENERGY SAVING AND RENEWAL PROCESSES IN THE URBAN PLANNING: A CASE STUDY IN THE ITALIAN CONTEXT

The design of urban sustainable regeneration actions and programs, which combines Renewal Energy System (RES) productions and new technologies for energy saving within the bonds and the resources of urban complex systems, is the key to reach the 20-20-20 target for our cities rather than our nations. Improving the efficiency of residential building stock is the main target of the urban regeneration process, unfortunately the definition of buildings energy demand and its representation at the urban level raise some problems due to the lack of available base data and to the strong variability of the factors that affect it. Therefore, architectural and urban planning needs tools and methodologies able to define, asses and represent hypothetical scenarios both on production of energy with RES as well as on results of building energy efficiency improvements at the urban scale. These tools must be cost-effective given the scarcity of financial resources of Public Administrations (PA). In addition, they have to be specific to local data availability and land use regulations context. The paper illustrates some results of a research that defines and tests a methodology to calculate and represent, at urban scale, the energy need of residential buildings and districts, based on the Italian data availability and the national regulations on energy efficiency in buildings. The methodology is designed with the necessary generality that enables it to be exported in different contexts. After a short description of the Italian context regarding Municipal energy urban planning and available data, we describe the methodology framework based on a simple bottom-up engineering approach developed on GIS environment. Then we will discuss some results of a case study in order to define the methodology potential and limits and to outline further research.