A holistic energy planning tool for Danish cities and districts

Buildings and building blocks are considered to be a key component in most national and international legislation and initiatives aiming to reduce energy consumption and the corresponding emissions, and to achieve the energy and environmental goals. However, most of the efforts and investigations reported in recent years have concentrated on energy efficient design and performance improvement of single buildings or limited clusters of buildings. Considering the transition towards interconnected cities and communities and the widespread evolution of smart and flexible thermal and electrical grids and microgrids, there is an urgent need to scale up the effort from energy efficient single buildings and clusters to interconnected energy efficient and flexible cities and neighbourhoods. This work presents the first initiative towards developing a holistic energy planner tool for energy efficient and interconnected Danish cities and neighbourhoods. The tool methodology relies on two major pillars: dynamic building energy performance simulations in Energy Plus and data from the Danish building standard BR18. In addition, the tool considers the buildings type, age and use in predicting and reporting the corresponding heating and electricity demands. The paper presents the development and demonstration of the tool in two case study streets in Denmark, each comprising more than 85 buildings. The overall heating and electricity demand of the streets along with peak energy capacities needed and performance gap evaluations are reported and assessed along with highlighting the impacts of a selection of energy efficient design scenarios on the energy demand. Overall, the proposed tool serves not only as a comprehensive city energy planner but also as a simple to use, flexible and user-friendly tool that can be utilised by a wide range of engineers, planners, and decision makers.