Using building energy simulation and geospatial modeling techniques to determine high resolution building sector energy consumption profiles

A technique is presented for estimating hourly and seasonal energy consumption profiles in the building sector at spatial scales down to the individual taxlot or parcel. The method combines annual building energy simulations for city-specific prototypical buildings and commonly available geospatial data in a Geographical Information System (GIS) framework. Hourly results can be extracted for any day and exported as a raster output at spatial scales as fine as an individual parcel (<100 m). This method can be applied to virtually any large U.S. city to obtain day-specific estimates of electricity and natural gas consumption within the residential and commercial sectors. As a demonstration this method has been applied to Houston TX. When the resulting profiles were averaged over 1.33 km grid cells, the resulting peak energy consumption within the urban core was found to be greater than 100 W/m². The resulting profiles can be used to estimate anthropogenic sensible and latent waste heat emissions associated with building energy consumption. The target application for this approach is urban scale atmospheric modeling in support of urban heat island and air quality studies. In such applications the inclusion of high spatial and temporal resolution waste heat data represents a significant advancement.