Techniques for Rapid Generation of Urban-Scale Energy Models

City governments, NGOs, portfolio managers, and owners are looking better ways to reduce energy use in their existing building stock. Traditional methods rely on costly and time consuming audits, or on benchmarking tools with limited ability to identify retrofit measures. A more effective approach utilizes urban scale 3D models to perform virtual energy assessments. This workflow relies on building a 3D model from multiple types of GIS data, annual hourly energy simulations, geospatial analysis techniques, and statistical benchmarking. The following presentation outlines this workflow, and provides a case study for reducing the time and money needed to identify retrofit strategies.