EECITIES provides the services and information you need to reach carbon emission reduction targets for buildings, cities and regions. The services it supports provide validated information related to energy efficient building and urban development. We can support you with training to develop and explore an accurate urban energy model of your neighbourhood, town, city or region. Alternatively, we can deliver studies carried out by our experts according to the criteria you specify.
The EECITIES services are based on technologies developed in the SEMANCO research project and include:
- Assessing the current energy performance of buildings in towns and cities. The assessment of the energy performance of buildings in a town or city is based on the creation of an urban energy model with the SEMANCO integrated platform. You can create an accurate urban energy model of your neighbourhood town, city or region with the data you currently have (cadastre, consumption, building properties, occupants profile, socio-economic data etc.). You can augment your data to improve the accuracy and scope of your urban energy model and analyse your urban energy model using energy assessment and simulation tools.
- Identifying priority areas and buildings for energy efficiency interventions. Once you have developed your urban energy model you can identify where to construct and renovate buildings to improve energy performance of your city. It is also possible to identify buildings most in need of renovation or replacement by their age of construction or use.
- Evaluating the impact of proposed new buildings at the urban level. The planning of new buildings can be carried out taking into account their impact at the neighbourhood, city or regional level. With the urban energy model created in the SEMANCO integrated platform it is possible to assess the impact of new buildings within an urban energy system taking into account building design and energy supply. This enables decisions about building characteristics and energy supply technologies to be informed by each other. In addition it is possible to identify the most appropriate new building developments for meeting energy performance goals set at the urban level using the optimisation tools provided by the platform.
- Evaluating the impact of refurbishing buildings at the urban level. The SEMANCO integrated platform enables the creation and evaluation of plans to improve the energy performance of existing buildings within an urban area. Multiple different designs for building refurbishment can be created and evaluated in terms of their ability to reduce energy demand, carbon emissions and costs. Multicriteria analysis tools are used to identify the building refurbishment solutions that present the greatest potential to achieve the targets set by your urban redevelopment plans.
- Evaluating the impact of potential of local policies and interventions on Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SEAP). When a city council is performing the diagnostic phase of a SEAP it might be necessary to create an energy baseline of an urban area. This baseline is produced by combining the existing information about buildings and energy systems with simulations of the energy demand. Once the energy baseline is obtained, multiple improvement scenarios can be created and their potential impact on urban energy demand and CO2 emissions can be calculated. The different scenarios are evaluated using multicriteria analysis tools to identify the solution that is most likely to achieve the targets set by the SEAP.
- Generating missing data to enable the classification of buildings according to their energy performance. In the absence of data, advanced analysis techniques based on data mining can be used to generate missing information. For instance, by extrapolating values from a limited sample, it is possible to assign an energy label to buildings in an urban area or to create a typology of buildings in an urban area.
- Integrating new data to be visualized and analysed. Besides the energy related data included in an urban energy model created in the SEMANCO platform, a customer might need to integrate other data such as social, demographic or even economic data. Any sort of data that can be related to a particular building within the city can be integrated in the urban energy model and later on, visualized and analysed using the features provided by the platform.