Methodology for Evaluation of Areal Energy System Considering Building Layout

Abstract

Regional policies toward “smart communities” or “compact cities” are garnering attention as the measures for reducing carbon emission. In this paper, we address the effects of treating a district as a unit of an energy demand-and-supply system, focusing the energy supply side. We target urban districts of several square kilometers, having populations of several tens of thousands, which are typical of densely-inhabited districts in Japan.
The methodology for evaluating energy system has two parts: an areal energy system model and a building layout generation model. The areal energy system model is improved from the traditional optimization-type energy models to enable the evaluation of a district’s building layout with consideration to its energy service demand distribution. The building layout generation model generates various imaginary building layouts within districts that have the same population size and climate conditions. The model result shows that compact building layout helps to reduce energy network infrastructure costs while it has little additional positive effect in reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions in terms of the energy supply system.