Assessment of tools for urban energy planning

Simone Ferrari, Federica Zagarella, Paola Caputo and Marina Bonomolo

Energy, 2019, vol. 176, issue C, 544-551

Abstract: In recent years, studies and policies have encouraged the diffusion of distributed energy supply technologies and large integration of renewable sources. This increases the need for new professionals in energy planning. Several computational tools for energy planning have been developed as described in the technical literature. However, energy planners of urban/district areas engaged in the transition towards smart systems related to buildings energy services require well-documented tools to evaluate the combination of available energy sources by proper conversion technologies. With this, after a scientific review, we selected 17 tools targeted on an urban/districts scale that can evaluate several energy services, sources and/or technologies, and provided with detailed and easily accessible documentation. These tools were classified based on their defined features: analysis type, operation spatial scale, outputs time scale, energy service, and licence. Among them, 6 user-friendly tools were identified (energyPRO, HOMER, iHOGA, EnergyPLAN, SIREN, WebOpt) that can provide hourly energy calculations and can be considered as viable for widespread use. Specifically, the general information, functionalities, structure, graphic user interface, required input data, and outputs were described. Therefore, the energy planners are guided towards choosing the most suitable tool based on their skills, aims, and data availability for a specific application.

Keywords: Planning of energy systems for building stocks; Smart energy systems; Urban/district energy models; Energy planning tools; User-friendly urban energy planning tools (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544219306772
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:176:y:2019:i:c:p:544-551

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2019.04.054

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().