Spatiotemporal Distribution of Urban Building Energy Consumption By End Use Using Building Modeling and High Resolution Forecasted Weather Data

The impacts of climate change are increasingly visible on dense urban environments. Indeed, many major metropolitan centers face increased peak electrical load, especially during extreme heat events. This may impact the reliability of the electric grid, raising the cost of the electricity generation.  It is therefore imperative to better understand the energy consumption profile in building sector for city scales. This understanding is not only paramount to users to avoid peak demand charges but also to utilities so that they can better anticipate the future energy use.

 This study aims to develop an energy-demand forecasting tool at a city scale using high resolution weather data interfaced with a single building energy model. We focused our work on New York City which has a comprehensive building dataset. Using the New York Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output (PLUTO),  51 building archetypes were identified, based on the building function (residential, educational or office), the age of the building, and the land use type. The single building simulation software used is EnergyPlus^TM , an open source code developed by the US Department of Energy. The weather input to the model is provided by an urbanized weather forecast based on the Weather Research and Forecast Model (uWRF). 

 Individual buildings were linked to the archetypes and scale them up using the total floor area of the building. The single building energy model is coupled to the weather model resulting in energy maps of the city. This map provides an energy end-use profile for NYC for total and individual components including lighting, equipment and HVAC. The methodology was validated with single building energy data for a particular location, and with city scale city scale energy demand profiles using records from the New York System Operator (NYISO) showing good agreements in both cases.  Queens Borough is the largest consumer of electricity representing almost two third of the NYC total demand. As for the highest energy density rate, Manhattan (especially South of Manhattan) produces the highest value with an average rate of 230 W/m².   The energy profiles vary from one type of building to another. On the one hand, a midrise apartment consumes 16.46 kWh/m² of electricity per day, used mainly in lightning and interior equipment that account respectively for 5.42kWh/m² and 7.95kWh/m². On the other hand, a large office needs 30.13 kWh/m² of electricity per day especially for lightning 11.19kWh/m² and HVAC system 6.43kWh/m².