Urban building energy modeling challenges: Evaluating zoning approaches and window impacts on energy consumption

Urban building energy modeling (UBEM) is an effective tool for analyzing energy flows at the urban scale. However, the modeling of UBEM tends to be simplified, which has the limitation that it does not accurately reflect the thermal performance of the actual buildings. This study analyzed the effect of the three different methods of thermal zoning (i.e., Single, Core/perimeter, Grid/cluster) and windows on the energy simulation results of UBEM.

As a result, the clustering zoning method reduced the total energy consumption by 33.4% compared to the Core/perimeter. This study showed that there are significant differences in the energy results depending on the modeling of UBEM.