Visualizing Our City’s Energy Use

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering and the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation used the City of Pittsburgh to create a model built upon the design, materials and purpose of commercial buildings to estimate their energy usage and emissions.

The building sector in the U.S. accounts for 39 percent of energy use, with commercial buildings responsible for about half of that. As cities grapple with climate change, making commercial buildings more efficient is a key part of the solution.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering and the Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation used the City of Pittsburgh to create a model built upon the design, materials and purpose of commercial buildings to estimate their energy usage and emissions. While other models may be hindered by a scarcity of data in public records, the researchers’ Urban Building Energy Model (UBEM) uses street-level images to categorize and estimate commercial buildings’ energy use. Their findings were recently published in the journal Energy & Buildings.

“We found that in the existing literature, the scale of commercial buildings was always one of the challenges. It’s cumbersome or even impossible to find and process detailed information about hundreds or thousands of buildings in an urban environment,” said Rezvan Mohammadiziazi, lead author and graduate student in the Swanson School’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Researchers need to rely on assumptions based on when buildings were built or what the mechanical and electrical systems look like. Our hope is that by using image processing, we can build a framework that reduces some assumptions.”

Read more at University of Pittsburgh

Photo Credit: pittsburghbeautiful via Pixabay