A climate resilient city, perforce, has an efficient and robust energy infrastructure that can harvest local energy resources and match energy sources and sinks that vary over space and time. This paper explores the use of an urban building energy model (UBEM) to examine the potential for creating a near-zero carbon neighbourhood in Dublin (Ireland) that is characterised by diverse land-uses and old and new building stock. UBEMs are a relatively new tool that allows the simulation of building energy demand across an urbanised landscape and can account for building layout, including the effects of overshadowing and the potential for facade retrofits and energy generation. In this research, a novel geographic database of buildings is created using archetypes, and the associated information on dimensions, fabric and energy systems is integrated into the Urban Modelling Interface (UMI). The model is used to simulate current and future energy demand based on climate change projections and to test scenarios that apply retrofits to the existing stock and that link proximate land-uses and land-covers. The latter allows a significant decoupling of the neighbourhood from an offsite electricity generation station with a high carbon output. The findings of this paper demonstrate that treating neighbourhoods as single energy entities rather than collections of individual sectors allows the development of bespoke carbon reducing scenarios that are geographically situated. The work shows the value of a neighbourhood-based approach to energy management using UBEMs.

The field of Urban Building Energy Modeling (UBEM), which assesses the energy performance of buildings in cities relies on advanced physical models known as building energy models that are representative of the building stock. These building archetypes are often developed in specific modelling platforms such as EnergyPlus or TRNSYS, two leading simulation engines in the field of building energy modeling. EnergyPlus is an open source simulation engine developed by the US Department of Energy. TRNSYS is a well established and specialized simulation platform used to simulate the behavior of transient systems. The Urban Modeling Interface (UMI), developed by the MIT Sustainable Design Lab, leverages EnergyPlus to enable building energy modeling at the urban scale. The three tools offer many advantages in their respective fields, but all suffer from the same flaw: creating building archetypes for any platform is a time-consuming, tedious and error-prone process. archetypal is a Python package that helps handling collections of such archetypes and to enable the interoperability between these energy simulation platforms to accelerate the creation of reliable urban building energy models. This package offers three major capabilities for researchers and practitioners:

With buildings accounting for 40% of global carbon emissions, cities striving to meet sustainability targets aligned with the Paris Agreement must retrofit their existing building stock within 30 years. Previous studies have shown that urban building energy models (UBEMs) can help cities identify technology pathways—combinations of energy efficiency retrofits and renewable energy deployment strategies—to meet emissions reduction goals. UBEMs are currently limited by cost to only the largest cities but must be expanded to all cities if society is going to meet scientifically-identified emissions reduction goals. This manuscript presents an eight-step framework to scale technology pathways analyses using UBEMs to all communities in a repeatable, affordable manner. The roles and responsibilities of three key personas, the sustainability champion, GIS manager, and an energy modeler, for each step are identified. The eight-step process is tested with a case study of 13 100 buildings in Oshkosh, WI, USA. The case study identified a technically-feasible path to nearly net zero emissions for Oshkosh’s buildings. Constraints in the workforce, supply chain, and retrofit adoption to attain this goal were identified to inform policymakers. The case study suggests that the eight-step process is a blueprint for action in communities around the world.