A METHODOLOGY FOR ASSESSING ENERGY PERFORMANCE OF A LARGE SCALE BUILDING STOCK

The research started in the framework of the wide debate about global and local environmental problems and energy sustainability at the municipality scale, where significant energy savings can be obtained by actions aimed to decrease energy demand in all the final uses and to change the lay out and the organization of functions, energy systems and plants. All these important changes can contribute to make settlements capable to develop towards low carbon model. While attempting to evaluate energy performances for a complex system like a city, main problems are related to get suitable data and to manage the big number of variables interacting: the lack of suitable tools and methods to select and elaborate all the inputs available from different sources makes the assessments long and complicated, often providing output data that are difficult to be interpreted. In this framework, a methodology for collecting information and providing elaborations and assessments of the energy performance referring to a large building stock was developed, taking as a case study the city of Milan, in Italy. The methodology involves the analysis of the available data, and the implementation of a GIS city buildings data-base. In order to develop a methodology able to be applied to all the Italian cities, the main information about the built environment were taken from the statistical data-base provided by the National Buildings Census. Further the GIS tool implemented in the framework of the research can be easily updated in order to evaluate the effects of possible scenarios aimed to improve the energy performance of the built environment, at city or district level, and to define strategies of distributed generation systems.