Impact of local weather in urban building simulation studies

Urban Simulations are increasingly used by city planners and policy makers as virtual experiments to test the strategies for the decarbonization in cities [1]. In this study, it is hypothesized that the efficacy of building upgrades varies across the city due to hyperlocal weather conditions stemming from manmade as well as naturally varying land use attributes.

With this background, three case studies are simulated with two scenarios: one with TMY weather across the city and another using local weather in 1 km x 1 km grid cells, with the aim to highlight the importance of local weather in urban simulations and its impact on making location specific policy decisions.

Building stock models are created using bottom-up approach and archetypical models are simulated on EnergyPlus engine. Building simulation models are forced by synthetic local weather and the results are combined with demographic data at neighborhood level to compute the indicators that can be utilized by urban policy makers.

The results indicate that the use of local weather must be preferred over TMY as higher fidelity weather data makes a significant difference in the assessment indicators that are related to energy poverty, heat vulnerability and the financial assessment of renewable energy systems.