Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O46GkHSYvYE
The Sustainable Design Lab at MIT has built a model which estimates the gas and electricity demand of every building in Boston for every hour of every day of the year, nearly 100,000 buildings in total.
Next the MIT team will be validating the model against actual energy consumption data. “We’ll do this using any building-level energy dataset that we can get our hands on, so the models become more and more accurate,” Professor Christoph Reinhart explained. “Ultimately, our goal is for every city in the world to rely on a citywide energy model to meaningfully manage its future energy supply and carbon emissions.” As Boston has an energy reporting and disclosure ordinance, Prof Reinhart and his team should have a lot of data to work with.
More at http://news.mit.edu/2016/mit-researchers-create-citywide-building-energy-model-boston-0222
The Boston city government will also be using the energy model in its energy planning process and MIT’s Sustainable Design Lab is now working on energy models for Lisbon, Portugal and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Christoph Reinhart and his team had previously built a solar map which shows the solar electric potential of every roof in the city: http://web.mit.edu/SustainableDesignLab/projects/CambridgeSolarMap/
Disclaimer: I know Christoph and like him. He is doing some great work.
