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.

Ground coupled heat pumps are a notoriously efficient system for heating and cooling buildings. Sometimes the characteristics of the building and the user’s needs are such that the amount of heat extracted from the ground during the winter season can be considerably different from the amount injected in summer. This situation can cause a progressive cooling or heating of the ground with a negative effect on the energy efficiency and correct operation of the system. In these cases, an accurate sizing has to be done. In systems already built, it could be necessary to intervene a posteriori to remedy an excessive ground thermal drift due to the energy unbalance. In this work, such a situation relating to a real office building in Italy is investigated and several solutions are examined, one of which has been then implemented. In particular, a hybrid heat pump using as heat sink both the ground and external air is compared with common solutions through computer simulations using a dedicated numerical model, which has also been compared with monitoring data. As a result, the hybrid heat pump shows better performance and limits the thermal drift of the ground temperature.