Energy demand profile generation with detailed time resolution at an urban district scale: A reference building approach and case study

The energy demand in urban areas has increased dramatically over the last few decades because of the intensive urbanization that has taken place. Because of this, the European Union has introduced directives pertaining to the energy performance of buildings and has identified demand side management as a significant tool for the optimization of the energy demand. Demand side management, together with thermal energy storage and renewable energy technologies, have mainly been studied so far at a building scale. In order to study and define potential demand side management strategies at an urban scale, an integrated urban scale assessment needs to be conducted. DiDeProM, a model that can be used to generate detailed thermal energy demand profiles, at an urban district scale, has been developed in the current study. It is a bottom-up engineering model, based on samples of the representative building technique. A parametric analysis of the important variables of building energy performance at an urban scale has then been carried out. This has generated a database of normalized thermal energy demand profiles with an hourly time resolution. The final step of the process includes the generation of a detailed overall thermal energy demand profile at an urban district scale. DiDeProM was applied to a block of buildings in Turin (Italy) as a case study. After the calibration of the simulation model on real monitored data, a parametric analysis on 300 scenarios for a reference building was conducted, generating a database of seasonal thermal heating energy demand profiles with hourly time steps. An average hourly heating profile was generated from this database according to a specific aggregation approach. The DiDeProM application indicated that the model works properly at the scale of a typical small block of buildings, and it is able to generate a total thermal energy demand profile, with detailed time resolution, at an urban district scale. These profiles will be used to create demand side management strategies that will integrate thermal energy storage and renewable energy technologies at a district scale