City-wide building energy efficiency assessment using EPC data

Abstract

The Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) requirements in Europe have provided rich data of energy efficiency status of individual buildings at scale, allowing appropriate assessments to be carried out without the need of conducting additional surveys. By 2012, the EPC data in England and Wales in the UK has reached a coverage of up to 45% of the entire building stock (DECC 2014), and the number of new certificates added every year is over 1 million. The work presented here seeks to understand the potential of using such dataset to deliver systematic analysis of energy efficiency of buildings at a city scale. This study utilises all EPC datasets available for the city of Southampton, UK, and developed an automatic geographic-referencing methodology so the EPC data can be integrated onto geographic information systems (GIS). Such methodology allows large quantity of EPC data to be analysed spatially, facilitating the assessment of energy performance of different regions in a city. The results show clearly areas in the city that have the lowest or highest level of performance in terms of buildings’ energy efficiency, and revealed the impact of certain building intervention measures (such insulation, double glazing) on the energy consumption within the considered buildings. The analyses show that factors such as the existence of high streets and new building developments have significant influence on the energy efficiency in the city where these are present. The geographic-referencing methodology developed in this study has the potential to be utilised in a wide range of subjects, bridging the current gap of data availability, allowing building related datasets to be incorporated with GIS analysis.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Yue Wu: orcid.org/0000-0002-4112-7935

ORCID for Luke Blunden: orcid.org/0000-0002-0046-5508

ORCID for Abubakr Bahaj: orcid.org/0000-0002-0043-6045

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