Integration of a building energy model with a regional planning tool for energy communities analysis

In Europe, buildings are among the biggest producers of greenhouse gas emissions and consumers of useful energy. To tackle this issue, many building energy models were developed with varying levels of complexities analyzing energy demand and supply options. Currently, not many of them fit the purpose of investigating renewable and citizen energy communities (RECs and CECs), which are continually expanding throughout Europe. These communities have their own set of spatial planning and policies measures and regulations to achieve regional and national energy-related goals. This necessitates the use of a regional planning and policy-support tool for analyses of these RECs and CECs from an energy system modeling and regional policy planning perspectives, which is not well-researched in the current literature. We addressed these issues by integrating an existing RECs and CECs-based building model named Building Energy Model, BuEM, with a regional spatial planning and decision-support tool, EnerPlanET. The integration activities between models involve the following: aligning ontological differences, defining a shared data exchange structure and format, creating a common database, and implementing to a systematic workflow. The interaction between models is bidirectional. To illustrate, EnerPlanET provides BuEM building information, such as archetypes, physical characteristics, and transmittance values. This information ranges from highly specific building components-related information towards less detailed-information such as building types, year of construction, communities information, and even country level information. BuEM uses these information as inputs to produce spatially resolved building level energy-related information on annual heat, cooling, and electricity demands with hourly resolution. BuEM additionally provides parameterized information on building-level heat supply options and the impacts of occupants on energy demand and supply. EnerPlanET uses these information to optimize the overall energy system at a community level. BuEM uses internal application programing Interfaces (APIs) to communicate between its own modules and external APIs to communicate with EnerPlanET. The overall modeling platform capabilities is enriched by incorporating user inputs via a graphical user interface on aspects, such as insulation levels, specific supply options, and comfort temperature ranges. Users can also add constraints related to factors such as ventilation, shading, and existing and expected or possible heat supply options. Additionally, users can override input information on aspects such energy consumptions and occupants’ behavior. We validated the overall model with a case study from one of the energy communities- in the Netherlands, Loenen. The overall model provides results on energy balance at individual buildings and community level, technology options’ investment choices, and spatial planning aspects. The overall tool can be applied for regional decision making related to energy use, efficiency, and sharing in multiple RECs and CECs within Europe having differences in geographical scopes, building characteristics, supply options and resources, and regional policies and regulations. The overall method is generic and can be applied for integrating other similar models.