Assessment of the Urban Heat Island Impact on Building Energy Performance at District Level with the EUReCA Platform

In recent decades, the cooling energy demand in urban areas is increasing ever faster due to the global warming and the growth of developing economies. In this perspective, the urban building energy modelling community is focusing its research activities on innovative tools and policy actions to imp...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Climate (Basel) 2021-03, Vol.9 (3), p.48
Main Authors: Romano, Pierdonato, Prataviera, Enrico, Carnieletto, Laura, Vivian, Jacopo, Zinzi, Michele, Zarrella, Angelo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Air temperature
Buildings
Capacitance
Case studies
Cities
Climate change
Computer applications
Cooling
Cooling systems
decarbonization
Demand analysis
Electric power demand
Electricity consumption
Energy
Energy demand
energy efficiency
Energy modeling
Geometry
Global warming
Heat
HVAC equipment
Modules
Shading
Simulation
Sustainability
Urban areas
urban heat island
Urban heat islands
urban modelling
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Summary:In recent decades, the cooling energy demand in urban areas is increasing ever faster due to the global warming and the growth of developing economies. In this perspective, the urban building energy modelling community is focusing its research activities on innovative tools and policy actions to improve cities’ sustainability. This work aims to present a novel module of the EUReCA (Energy Urban Resistance Capacitance Approach) platform for evaluating the effects of the interaction between district’s buildings in the cooling season. EUReCA predicts the urban energy demand using a bottom-up approach and low computational resources. The new module allows us to evaluate the mutual shading between buildings and the urban heat island effects, and it is well integrated with the calculation of the energy demand of buildings. The analysis was carried out considering a real case study in Padua (Italy). Results show that the urban heat island causes an average increase of 2.2 °C in the external air temperature mainly caused by the waste heat rejected from cooling systems. This involves an increase in urban cooling energy and electricity demand, which can be affected between 6 and 8%. The latter is the most affected by the urban heat island (UHI), due to the degradation it causes on the HVAC systems’ efficiency.
ISSN:2225-1154
2225-1154
DOI:10.3390/cli9030048