An integrated urban building energy benchmarking workflow to support urban energy evaluation: a case study of Sheffield UK

Understanding energy demand and supply flow at a large urban scale is an essential step for urban designers, planners and policymakers in investigating how buildings within an existing urban context could be designed as a whole to support the future sustainable built environment. The contemporary approach is to model energy use activities at various building and urban scales. This, albeit a practical approach, poses significant challenges in acquiring good quality data concerning buildings and their interactions at an urban scale at an affordable price. This paper presents a streamlined benchmarking methodology with a parametric modelling workflow to complement the mainstream urban building energy modelling (UBEM) approach. The proposed building energy benchmarking workflow integrates multiple databases concerning building energy consumption, energy generation and underlying grid infrastructure. Parametric modelling serves as a tool for integrating databases through the underlying sortable geometric characteristics. This is envisaged to afford stockholders, such as policymakers or urban planners, greater flexibility to investigate energy demand and supply scenarios at an urban neighbourhood scale and further explore potential applications. Using the proposed workflow, we look at renewable solar energy to experiment with offsetting urban building energy consumption through reconfiguring existing electricity microgrids in the Sheffield city centre. The result of this study demonstrates how the presented urban building energy benchmarking (UBEB) workflow would afford capabilities and flexibility to support stakeholders, e.g., urban planners, policymakers, and end-users, to better understand existing barriers and explore actionable opportunities via re-configurable electricity microgrids.