Capturing the long-term interdependencies between building thermal energy supply and demand in urban planning strategies

Urban areas play a crucial role in fostering low carbon energy patterns and the decarbonization of buildings energy consumption is at the heart of this process. Energy system analyses have recently gained the attention of urban policy makers due to their comprehensive and long-term perspective on the activities of the entire supply/demand chain, traditionally treated independently when shaping building urban energy strategies. This paper presents a spatial and temporally resolved urban energy system optimization model with specific features in order to describe the interactions between energy efficiency in buildings and heat supply strategies. A preliminary case study is proposed for offering numerical evidence to results. The results show that a planned combination of fuel switching, energy efficiency and building retrofit may complementary lead to meet ambitious climate targets at a reasonable added cost. From the results emerge that urban energy system models might help researcher and decision makers in generating robust holistic scenarios and in providing quantitative elements to exclude actions that are not economically affordable, technologically feasible and environmentally sustainable. Nevertheless, to be fully adoptable for real applications, existing barriers need to be overcome with special attention to the definition of input data protocols and the stakeholder involvement since the beginning.