UrbanZEB Tool. Towards the Development of Urban Strategies for Energy Transition of Buildings

Abstract

The European Union has laid the foundations for the improvement of the energy efficiency of its building stock with decarbonisation targets of 80-95%, transforming existing into near-zero energy consumption buildings (nZEB). The existing state planning, such as ERESEE 2020 (the Spanish LTRS), has to lead to planning at the urban and metropolitan scale because this is the appropriate scale for making accurate diagnoses, planning effective strategies, and executing the necessary actions together with the social and productive network. This is the scale on which urbanZEB project has been developed, encompassing energy renovation strategies from local to regional scale. urbanZEB is a planning tool developed to diagnose and carry out a global action plan for urban areas, evaluating and representing their current situation, defining environmental objectives over time, and generating a transition roadmap at urban scale that specifies where, when and which actions need to be implemented as well as which monitoring indicators need to be established. The tool includes an innovative software based on Big Data techniques able to determine the specific characteristics of each building, perform an hour-by-hour energy simulation from a multi-zone thermal model, and assess the energy and economic effects of a specific building renovation. The results provided at the architectural, energetic, and economic level, as well as the intervention criteria, can be consulted building by building as well as in an aggregate way, for higher units -census section, neighborhood, municipality-, through an online platform addressed to citizens, professionals and researchers, technicians of the administration and political teams.