Generic bottom-up building-energy models for developing regional energy transition scenarios

Abstract

Energy demand from buildings has the largest single share of the global final energy demand, but offers massive energy saving potentials through state-of-the-art technologies and behavioural changes. However, the required speed of technology adoption and behavioural changes to achieve such savings are largely uncertain and embedded in complex socio-technical system. Successful examples of achieving such systemic transition in the energy system are mostly found on the regional scale. Therefore a transition from the existing conventional centralized and mainly fossil fuelbased energy infrastructure towards a decentralized and renewable-based energy infrastructure is required. This research presents a generic bottom-up building-energy model for developing regional energy scenarios. Besides the development of regional scenarios, this model allows for analysing various detailed aspects of buildings' energy demand, such as retrofitting behaviour, technology adoption, and occupancy behaviour with agent-based modelling extensions.