Improving energy performance of buildings in an urban environment using 3D models

The European Union has set itself agressive goals to reduce GHG emissions by 20%, increase renewables share of energy generation to 20%, and to reduce energy cinsumption by 20% by 2020.  The EU seems to be on track for the first two goals, but the third remains a challenge.  In the EU something like 40% of energy is consumed by buildings, heating and lighting being the largest factors.

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Yesterday at the GI_Forum Symposium, Wolfgang Wasserburger gave an overview of a project SUNSHINE (Smart Urban Services for Higher Energy Efficiency) focused on energy efficiency for buildings in an urban environment.  Sunshine is a European funded project that started a few  months ago and is intended to continue for 36 months.

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Energy certification of buildings is a key policy instrument for reducing the energy consumption and improving the energy performance of new and existing buildings. It is expected to help increase demand for high performance buildings by improving the energy performance of the building stock in urban centers. SUNSHINE is intended as a step towards toward such a policy and a way to  contribute to improving the energy efficiency of buildings.

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SUNSHINE is intended to be accessible to Web and mobile platforms. An interesting feature of the project is that it is planned to develop an extended CityGML model for representing urban structures for energy performance modeling.

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Three use cases are being considered.

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1 Assessment of energy performance

The goal is to supports the automatic large-scale assessment of building energy performance based on publicly available data. The building energy performance models will be used for energy.density mapping ("ECOMaps") .  It is intended that an ADE extension to CityGML for 3D building energy modeling will be developed.

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2 Heating and cooling forcast and alerts

This focusses on existing buildings that have been selected for energy performance improvement.  It relies on localized weather forecasts and other information to forecast heating/cooling requirements to optimize energy performance..

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3 Optimization of power consumption by public lightimg

The idea is to control illumination so that areas are only illuminated when people are present and the level of natural lighting requires it.

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SUNSHINE will be piloted at nine sites across five countries that include 20 public buildings in Ferrara, 60 technical buildings in Trentino, and public illumination sysems in several Italian cities.