Characterizing urban building energy consumption in a high spatiotemporal resolution using a City Building Energy Use Model (CityBEUM) for mitigation strategies under climate change

Abstract:

Urban buildings account for up to 75% of total energy use in the United States (U.S.). Understanding urban building energy use is important for developing feasible options to mitigate energy use and greenhouse gas emissions under climate change and extreme events, as well as anticipated urbanization. For example, the city of Des Moines, Iowa joined in the City Energy Project in 2016 with a committed goal to reduce its energy consumption by 50% by 2030. In this study, we first characterized urban building energy consumption at the single building level and hourly scale in Boston and Des Moines, USA using a City Building Energy Use Model (CityBEUM), an improved bottom-up building energy use model. We then quantified urban heat island (UHI) using satellite observations and the mesoscale Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and evaluated the impact of UHI on spatial and temporal patterns of building energy consumption. Finally, we explored the implication of energy efficiency policies for mitigating the future city-wide building energy use under two climate change scenarios, Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) 4.5 and RCP 8.5. We found that CityBEUM can be used not only to characterize the baseline building energy use in high spatiotemporal resolutions, but also to explore strategies of building energy use mitigation for low carbon cities under climate change and extreme events.