Urban neighbourhoods – an intermediate scale for the assessment of energy performance of buildings

Panel: 5. Saving energy in buildings: The time to act is now

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Authors:
Andreas Koch, Eifer - European Institute for Energy Research, Germany
Sebastien Girard, European Institute for Energy Research, Germany

Abstract

The paper argues that the switch towards zero or positive energy buildings as a defined goal of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive resembles a change of paradigm for the energy infrastructure to supply those buildings. It will consequently be no longer sufficient to understand buildings as the demand side of an energy system. In contrast buildings will have to be also regarded as part of the supply side at the same time. While in current demonstration projects of positive energy buildings mainly electricity accounts for the supply side of a building’s energy balance future assessments could also account for thermal energy trading schemes in a given area.

Therefore in addition to the scale of buildings the specific scale of urban neighbourhoods offers an intermediate scale in its own right which holds the potential for a better understanding of energy supply and demand structures in the energy assessment of high performance buildings and settlements.

The political commitment to the introduction of nearly zero energy buildings thus induces a need to discuss system boundaries for the applied calculation procedures to describe the energy balance of buildings and for the assessment of their impact on local energy networks. The balance of a building block or an urban quarter therefore seems a necessary prerequisite to grasp the full technical and economic potential of nearly zero or positive energy buildings including advanced energy management strategies.

In addition to the general debate the paper will present first steps towards an energy balance model for urban neighbourhoods in the form of a multi-sector grey-box approach combining a simplified quasi steady state calculation consistent with the general approach of the ISO 13790 standard and a single variant model for the load prediction of large scale energy systems.