Energy modelling of buildings at urban level: the case-study district of Padua University

The improvement of buildings’ energy performances is a fundamental challenge in order to develop advanced methods to design, manage and retrofit the buildings. This work aims at analysing the impact of the improvements in energy efficiency to buildings at urban level. In particular, a simplified thermal Resistance-Capacitance (RC) model to simulate the transient behaviour of buildings is developed and compared with the dynamic software EnergyPlus that requires higher computational resources. The comparison is carried out in both heating and cooling season for a case-study district in Padua (Italy). The proposed model allows an efficient and reliable evaluation of the built environment, at both building and district level, from energy, environmental and economic points of view. To this purpose, different retrofit scenarios are compared by means of district-scaled techno-economic indicators based on the results of the developed tool.