Sensitivity assessment of a district energy assessment characterisation model based on cadastral data

Sustainable energy planning of cities is a complex problem which should address the comparative analysis of alternative future energy scenarios form a social, economic and environmental point of view. In this regard, the development of methods and tools to allow building energy demand characterization of large areas is becoming one of the main challenges in this field. New studies focused on the energy diagnosis of districts and cities with different location and climatic conditions are necessary to calibrate current methods and assumptions, as well as for the replication of the validated method in other cities around the globe. This paper provides a comparative analysis of the results obtained during the sensitivity assessment of a specific tool for the building energy demand characterization at city scale developed by Tecnalia in the European research project PlanHeat for four different European cities. During this calibration process, the influence of the main parameters that can be adjusted within the tool is evaluated and discussed. Results show that the relevance of adjusting properly each parameter varies depending on the climate zone of the city evaluated and other characteristics of the conjunction of buildings included in each district.