Unveiling Spatial and Temporal Variations of Building Energy Use and Anthropogenic Heat Emissions in Hong Kong

Anthropogenic heat generated by building energy use contributes to the urban island and climate change. Quantifying high spatiotemporal resolution city scale building energy use (BEU) and anthropogenic heat emission (AHE) is necessary for understanding urban microclimate and sustainable development. However, the current shortage of such data is insufficient to support urban energy management and climate decision-making. We estimated BEU and AHE from buildings in Hong Kong using a GIS-based city-scale building energy model (GIS-CBEM) and investigated their spatiotemporal variations. First, all buildings were categorized into 11 types, and a prototype was developed for each type. These prototypes were then calibrated using annual building energy consumption data from surveys. We studied the energy use profile for each building prototypes under the Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) weather data. Then, we estimated hourly BEU and AHE for all buildings in Hong Kong at the individual building level. The study results unveiled the spatiotemporal variation of buildings in Hong Kong at high resolution and detected divergent structure of building end-use and fuel use for different building prototypes. We found that the total BEU of all buildings in Hong Kong peaked at 5.1 × 10⁹ kWh in August, with 36.7% from HAVC system, while the lowest BEU was found in February at 3.5 ×10⁹kWh, with 14.1% from HAVC system. Total AHE from all buildings reached a maximum of 8.1 × 10⁹ kWh in July and minimum of 4.1 × 10⁹ kWh in February. Our findings have critical significance in enhancing energy efficiency, reducing environmental impact, and promoting sustainable development.