CityCalc – Energieplanungs- und Bewertungsinstrument für den Städtebau

Motivation

In the last decades the focus in energy planning mainly has been on individual buildings. Due to this fact current energy planning and assessment tools for early design stages (urban planning, architectural competitions) do not take into account the mutual interactions of buildings such as shading and shadowing due to the surroundings. A great variety of tools for solar design exist nowadays, but they are not suitable for architects and early design stages.

In future it will be of increasing importance to quantify the passive and active solar gains in order to fulfil ambitious legal and funding requirements and to implement future-oriented building concepts (eg. passive house , zero energy, zero carbon or plus energy standard).

Objectives and methodology

The research project CityCalc aims at developing an easily applicable energy planning and assessment tool for urban planning projects in the early design stages, as well as for the analysis of the existing building stock. CityCalc focuses exclusively on energy efficiency – that is, the reduction of energy demand – with the best possible use of site-specific energy sources (gains from solar thermal and photovoltaic plants, wind energy, combined heat and power). In order to ensure a simple, user-friendly usability for architects and planer, a three-dimensional geometry and data acquisition and an interface to the energy calculation software is developed. After the end of the research project CityCalc will be available as commercial software tool.