Preliminary analysis for energy efficiency assessment. Deriving technical parameters with spatial analysis and GEE

When discussing climate change and cultural heritage, the focus often lies exclusively of the vulnerability aspects of the latter. However, cultural heritage can also play an active role in activating strategies and actions to increase its sustainability and mitigate environmental impacts.

Energy rehabilitation and reuse of existing buildings hold the potential to contribute to sustainable heritage conservation while embracing new energy efficiency principles.

According to literature, energy rehabilitation and retrofitting of the building envelope need to be carried out with respect to historic and cultural features and the protection of cultural heritage. This applies as much to listed buildings as to those that, although not formally protected, are part of the historical heritage and define the identity and the skyline of the place (Magrini, Franco, 2016).

In this work, starting from the spatial modeling of the territory and use of satellite data thank to the free-cloud application Google Earth Engine (GEE), it is possible to perform some preliminary analysis. These ones are useful to derive some formal characteristics that directly influence both the energy requirements and the choice of some technological solutions for integrating renewable energy sources (Forster et al.,2025).

References

Forster et al.,2025: Forster, J., S. Bindreiter, B. Uhlhorn, V. Radinger‐peer, and A. Jiricka‐pürrer. 2025. 'A Machine Learning Approach to Adapt Local Land Use Planning to Climate Change', Urban Planning, 10.

Magrini, Franco, 2016: Magrini, A., and G. Franco. 2016. 'The energy performance improvement of historic buildings and their environmental sustainability assessment', Journal of Cultural Heritage, 21: 834-41.