City Scale Modeling with OpenStudio

Conference · Fri Aug 12 04:00:00 EDT 2016

OSTI ID:1344763

Assessing the impact of energy efficiency technologies at a district or city scale is of great interest to local governments, real estate developers, utility companies, and policymakers. This paper describes a flexible framework that can be used to create and run district and city scale building energy simulations. The framework is built around the new OpenStudio City Database (CityDB). Building footprints, building height, building type, and other data can be imported from public records or other sources. Missing data can be inferred or assigned from a statistical sampling of other datasets. Once all required data is available, OpenStudio Measures are used to create starting point energy models and to model energy efficiency measures for each building. Together this framework allows a user to pose several scenarios such as 'what if 30% of the commercial retail buildings added rooftop solar' or 'what if all elementary schools converted to ground source heat pumps' and then visualize the impacts at a district or city scale. This paper focuses on modeling existing building stock using public records. However, the framework is capable of supporting the evaluation of new construction, district systems, and the use of proprietary data sources.

• Research Organization: NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO (United States))
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), NREL Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD)
• DOE Contract Number: AC36-08GO28308
• OSTI ID: 1344763
• Report Number(s): NREL/CP-5500-68016
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION
CityDB
OpenStudio
OpenStudio City Database
building energy simulations