Home // International Journal On Advances in Systems and Measurements, volume 6, numbers 3 and 4, 2013 // View article

Urban Area Energy Flow Microsimulation for Planning Support: a Calibration and Verification Study

Authors:
Diane Perez
Jérôme Henri Kämpf
Jean-Louis Scartezzini

Keywords: urban energy flow simulation, heating demand simulation, calibration, verification, monitored energy consumption, energy demand and supply

Abstract:
A recently developed energy management platform named MEU (an acronym for Management of Energy in Urban areas) has been tested on three case study urban areas of a few hundred buildings in the Swiss cities of la Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel and Martigny. The MEU simulation framework for energy-efficient systems simulates the buildings' energy demand, infers the production of the connected energy conversion systems, and simulates the complete demand and supply energy flow picture. The platform is designed to use monitored consumption data if available, and, where it is not, intends to produce correct estimates of the average energy demands of housing and administrative buildings. This article explores in detail the capacity of the platform to correctly represent existing urban areas' energy flow based on the limited data available by comparing the simulated values with monitored data. Default values are carefully chosen to obtain a statistically adequate match, thus strengthening the confidence in simulation results when no monitored data is available. The study also leads to interesting observations and hypotheses regarding the energy efficiency of existing buildings, and provides useful conclusions about the possibilities and limitations of the simulation of disaggregated urban energy flow.

Pages: 260 to 271

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2013. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2013

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-261x