Mapping the city scale anthropogenic heat emissions from buildings in Kuala Lumpur through a top-down and a bottom-up approach

The warming urban climates increase the building energy consumption by changing the heating/cooling loads of the buildings. On the other hand, building induced anthropogenic heat emissions can also contribute to the urban heating, creating a warming feedback loop. Such impact is more profound in the (sub)tropical and hot/arid context, where Air Conditioning (AC) systems are widely used. A better understanding of the building energy consumption and its contribution to urban heating can therefore help mitigate urban heating. To this end, we aim to estimate building energy use and induced heat emissions in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, using both a bottom-up strategy based on building energy modelling and a top-down strategy based on national scale energy inventory. We further integrate the building energy model with measured diurnal temperature profiles at different land use areas, to discuss the impact of urban heat island (UHI) on energy use, and potential mitigation strategies through different urban morphologies. The estimated energy use obtained via both bottom-up and the top-down approaches were within the range of actual energy use from case studies available for Kuala Lumpur. It also highlights the need to adapt multi-scale strategies to mitigate the building energy use, and the associated impacts on the UHI