Efficient Heat Demand and Solar Air Collector Heat Supply Estimation Using 3D Geospatial Information

Modelling of buildings' heat demand provides decision makers information on the required energy on a house level. This is important, among other, to orient supply and subsidy policies. In residential buildings of the Netherlands around 70% of the gas is consumed on space heating, which is therefore the dominant share of the total heat demand. Different parameters have influence on space heat demand of a residential building: such as building architecture, material, age and inhabitants behavior. Collecting such information manually on a building level is a laborious process which can in many cases be substituted by automated extraction from geospatial information. This study proposes an automated workflow to extract the key parameters on heat demand of residential buildings. We have implemented the workflow in Amsterdam using geospatial technology and geospatial data. The case study revealed that the automatic extraction of data increased the efficiency of the whole process and the scalability of the analysis. Subsequently, we focused on renewable energy as heat supply source. We model the heat energy gain of a solar air collector, as a renewable energy source, using geospatial information for each building. Heat demand and solar air collector heat supply results for each building are crucial elements for decision making, both at policy level and at individual citizens to decide on investing in renewable energy. In order to make such information available to the largest possible audience, we implemented this information flow in an interactive web application. In the Netherlands 35% of the total energy is consumed in the built area. This amount equals to 30% of the total CO2 emissions in this country. Energy consumption ratio between residential and utility buildings is almost 50/50. Considering the total amount, we come to the conclusion that reducing energy consumption in residential sector will lead to considerable reduction in total consumed energy of the Netherlands. Currently there are policies on European and Netherlands level for the energy reduction in built areas. Based on EPBD directives, from 2020 new buildings should be energy neutral. Reducing energy consumption in buildings and using renewable energy sources are the important goals in EPBD directives for European Union. In the Netherlands more than 55% of the total energy is being consumed for space heating which is large share of the total used energy. Decreasing this energy amount and using renewable energy sources for space heating will lead to considerable energy savings in building areas. To move towards this goal, the first step will be having an overview on the current status of space heating demand in building and neighbourhood level. This will help decision makers and energy sector by proving them the heat demand information. However, estimating the heat demand for each building manually is an expensive and time consuming task, especially when performed for the whole country or even a whole city. Therefore automated procedures for estimating the heat demand is greatly appreciated.