Development and Calibration of an Urban Building Energy Model for the city of Padua

Research about Urban Building Energy Models (UBEMs) has undergone a significant increase in recent years. In most of the papers in the scientific literature, researchers claim that UBEMs can be used by policy makers and other stakeholders to evaluate and plan energy efficiency measures at urban scale. Despite their good purpose, researchers are still the main users of these tools. This work tries to make a step forward by calibrating an UBEM on real energy consumption data from 489 residential buildings of Padua (Italy), and to use the calibrated model to assess two energy efficiency measures on the considered sample of buildings. Results show that calibrating only two coefficients is sufficient to obtain an accurate model with a limited computation effort. The analysis of two renovation scenarios suggests that deep retrofits on the biggest consumers is an effective strategy to abate CO2 emissions at urban level.