The existing stock of institutional buildings constructed before current thermal regulation codes is known to be high-energy consuming. To make energy savings, retrofitting solutions have to deal with important transformations of those buildings (e.g. envelope, energy systems) and with better-suited management solutions. Such technical solutions quite often neglect occupants' comfort. The present work aims to develop and implement an energy audit protocol to tackle simultaneously the questions of thermal comfort and energy efficiency for higher education buildings. Our transverse approach allowed us to achieve a complementary view of the building under examination, including its operating conditions. At any rate, capturing the full complexity of a building-system (building energy devices, management strategies, and occupancy and behaviours impacts) requires a broad perspective and points to the limits of key-in-hand audits and solutions.
Abstract. The anthropogenic heat flux can be an important part of the urban surface energy balance. Some of it is due to energy consumption inside buildings, which depends on building use and human behaviour, both of which are very heterogeneous in most urban areas. Urban canopy parametrisations (UCP), such as the Town Energy Balance (TEB), parametrise the effect of the buildings on the urban surface energy balance. They contain a simple building energy model. However, the variety of building use and human behaviour at grid point scale has not yet been represented in state of the art UCPs. In this study, we describe how we enhance the Town Energy Balance in order to take fractional building use and human behaviour into account. We describe how we parametrise different behaviours and initialise the model for applications in France. We evaluate the spatio-temporal variability of the simulated building energy consumption for the city of Toulouse. We show that a more detailed description of building use and human behaviour enhances the simulation results. The model developments lay the groundwork for simulations of coupled urban climate and building energy consumption which are relevant for both the urban climate and the climate change mitigation and adaptation communities.
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