Towards Auto-Calibrated UBEM Using Readily Available, Underutilized Urban Data: A Case Study for Ithaca, NY

• Published in: Energy and buildings 2024-08, Vol.317, p.114286, Article 114286
• Main Authors: Kastner, Patrick, Dogan, Timur
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Consumer-specific Energy Usage Data (CEUD); Optimization; Photovoltaics; Scenario planning; Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM)
• ISSN: 0378-7788
• DOI: 10.1016/j.enbuild.2024.114286

The shift toward urban decarbonization, which involves transitioning to heat pumps and integrating photovoltaic (PV) energy generation, poses substantial challenges to electricity grids in cities. Ithaca, NY, with its commitment to the Green New Deal, serves as a case study for cities confronted with these challenges. This paper explores how various building electrification scenarios might affect Ithaca's net-zero ambitions. We show that our reduced-order Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM) approach can accurately predict building energy consumption and rooftop solar PV energy generation for the 6114 buildings in the City of Ithaca. Building on that, we present three increasingly ambitious decarbonization scenarios that offer a holistic perspective on Ithaca's future electrification potential. In automating the reconstruction of building geometry from readily available LiDAR data, along with automated BEM setup and calibration, our methodology offers a robust toolkit to plan holistic decarbonization efforts. We argue that our approach, which forecasts both UBEM and PV for all residential and commercial buildings within a single framework, provides insights that cannot be reached with siloed methods. In the future, we believe that the abundance of readily available urban data sets will allow us to transition our approach to other jurisdictions across the US. •The monthly gas and electricity demand of 6114 buildings in Ithaca are modeled using UBEM.•We implement a validation approach via anonymized billing data that avoids privacy concerns.•We test three decarbonization scenarios regarding building electrification and photovoltaics•The scenarios offer top-level estimation of Ithaca's achieveable ‘net zero days’.•Our fast scenario analysis provides a foundation for evaluating retrofitting interventions.