Evaluating the Impact of Urban Microclimate on Buildings' Heating and Cooling Energy Demand Using a Co-Simulation Approach

The current research proposes an integrated computational method to consider the effect of the urban microclimate and the higher urban air temperatures on the assessment of urban building energy demands on an annual basis. A one-way coupling procedure is established to generate datasets on typical weather years that can capture the particularities of the urban microclimate as a function of their morphological and geometrical characteristics, thus providing a global perspective of the annual building energy performance at a reasonable computational cost. The proposed simulation method, here applied for an energy performance analysis of generic, non-insulated building units located in four different urban sites of Thessaloniki, Greece, is based on the three tools: (a) the ENVI-met v.4 microclimate model, (b) the Meteonorm weather generator and (c) the dynamic BEPS tool EnergyPlus. The obtained simulation results indicate a decrease in the annual heating energy needs of the examined building units of 8.2-11.5% when the effect of urban warming was accounted for, along with a rise in the annual cooling energy needs of between 13.4 and 28.2%, depending on the case study area.