About Difficulty to Model Energy Demand at Local Scale

Modeling energy demand at local scales (district, city or region) becomes more and more relevant in view of massive implementation of energy efficiency actions and energy solutions based on renewable. For instance, the knowledge of energy needs for space heating, cooling or domestic hot water production enables to imagine solutions adapted to these scales, either to reduce the needs or to meet them through local resource (solar production for a district, integration of biomass in a district heating network, local micro wind turbines for a neighborhood, combination of various local energy sources ...). Many tools have been developed at the building scale in the past but the quantity and the availability of data necessary to perform calculations make them maladjusted to the scales considered here. Furthermore, several tools have been developed in the last decade (EEP, SUNtool, Enerter, End-Use Simulation Model at City Scale...) in order to tackle energy issues at urban or regional scales. The aim of this work is to illustrate the importance of the input data and their type in the scale change (from building to city).