Eicker U. 3D City Modelling for Urban Scale Heating Energy Demand Forecasting

The purpose of the work is the development of an urban energy management tool to predict the heating energy demand of urban quarters and analyse strategies to improve the building standards. A forecast of the heating energy demand of each building can be used to determine the potential for heating energy reduction at a city quarter scale. To achieve this goal, a special method is used, which enables an automatic extraction of the building’s heating volume from a geo-information system. The buildings ’ volume, which consists of the building footprints and the measured building heights (from airborne laser scanning) enables the generation of a 3D city model of the analyzed area. Based on this 3D city model an input file, which can be read by the Building Simulation Model, is generated. Special focus is put on a method for modeling the heating energy demand of the buildings with the least input parameters possible, but giving reliable forecast results. A simple transmission heat loss method and an energy balance method were tested. In both cases, there was a good correlation between the measured and calculated annual values for the most buildings of the demonstration site Scharnhauser Park near Stuttgart/Germany. The good results also show that a 3D city model (even with low geometrical detail) can be used for energy demand forecasting on an urban scale