Barriers of large-scale energy efficiency modelling of urban building stocks. Methods to overcome them – the case of the Re-Polis platform.

The European Union has set strict goals towards climate-neutral cities by 2050, pushing private and public stakeholders to develop integrated assessment tools for measuring urban buildings’ energy performance and designing sustainable retrofitting strategies. Within this context, efficient energy use modelling of urban built environments, in a precise and transparent manner, is a crucial driver for global cities’ decarbonisation. Thus, rapid developments of bottom-up and top-down methodologies and tools reflect the current international research and technological developments in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) software industry. Combined bottom-up based GIS technologies and building typologies (archetype buildings) enable a detailed energy performance analysis of urban built environments. Since the results are produced for each building unit, these methods offer scalability, starting from single buildings to neighbourhoods and whole cities. In order to assess the energy performance of urban buildings in a bottom-up and efficient way, several aspects must be considered, such as substantial differentiations in archetype buildings according to the use, location, year of construction and each country’s profile. Furthermore, access to pan-European building typologies data, developed with the same methodology, is crucial to overcome such barriers. Moreover, although dispersed methodological tools already exist, no integrated methods have yet been developed, that can be easily used on a pan-European base. As an innovative, cloud-based tool, the Re-Polis platform aims to fill the gap in urban buildings’ large-scale energy efficiency modelling. Within this context, this paper describes all barriers identified during the design of the Re-Polis platform, regarding the development of an end-to-end robust methodological procedure and the decisions that were made to overcome them.