Buildings in cities consume 30 to 70% of cities’ total primary energy. Planning and evaluating retrofit strategies for buildings requires a deep understanding of the physical characteristics, operating patterns, and energy use of the building stock. This talk introduces a web-based data and computing platform, City Building Energy Saver (CityBES), which focuses on energy modeling and analysis of a city’s building stock to support district or city-scale efficiency programs. CityBES uses an international open data standard, CityGML, to represent and exchange 3D city models. CityBES targets urban planners, city energy managers, building owners, utilities, energy consultants and researchers.

Urban planners use simulation analysis for making long term infrastructure investment and policy decisions based on things like population, income, real estate values, accessibility, and protection of open space and the environment. However, building energy use is rarely part of that planning process. This talk describes demographics, economic process, land use regulation, real estate markets and transportation systems for building energy model tools to assess impact of policy on future building energy use and carbon footprints can be easily determined along with the effects of building energy use on the value of real estate, population, and business economics.