Generating Bottom-up Building Demand Profiles for Energy System Modelling with HiSim

Generating Bottom-Up Building Demand Profiles for Energy System Modelling with HiSimIn energy system modeling for regions or countries, the energy demand of residential buildings is one of the critical inputs. Currently in the energy system models frequently the current demand profiles are used to model the future demand. But future energy demand profiles will most likely look significantly different. The open-source building energy system modeling tool HiSim provides a framework to generate future demand profiles by doing a bottom-up simulation of heating systems, air conditioning systems, demand side management, and more for individual houses. The tool is written in Python, modular, extendable, contains a reporting engine for visualizing results and is easy to scale up to hundreds or thousands of parallel simulations for doing sensitivity studies or generating country-wide profiles by simulating a representative set of individual houses. The tool comes with over 30 different predefined components and custom components can be added. The software has been developed in the projects PIEGStrom to generate battery sizing guidelines and then further improved in the EU-project WHY to enable generic building simulation and to calculate the impact of demand side management and other factors on future energy systems. The tool is using a default time resolution of 1 minute. HiSim is freely available under the MIT-License at https://github.com/FZJ-IEK3-VSA/HiSi