Methods for estimating buildings energy demand at district level as input for defining distributed energy scenarios.

In the framework of distributed energy planning, evaluating reliable energy profiles of different sectors has a prominent role. At the same time, it is a quite challenging task, since the availability of actual energy profiles is not widespread. For guiding stakeholders involved in local smart energy planning to choose the proper method for assessing the buildings energy demand, we surveyed 70 studies, adopting different methods including some case-studies applications and highlighting the ones adopting hourly energy profiles. From the methodological perspective, a set of criteria for classifying the selected contributions was defined and, as final results, tables summarizing the main methods characteristics and a selection of studies providing directly usable energy profiles are reported. The research, broadly, demonstrates that the potential replicability of analysed methods is constrained to the datasets availability and, particularly, highlights the need of reliable hourly energy profiles definition for developing accurate energy scenarios.