District templates

For a given retrofitting strategy, mapping of the potential energy savings per district identified in Bolzano city centre

How to decide on the most impacting retrofitting strategies according to your city’s configuration… and budget?

DOWEL (formerly TECHNOFI) has been developing a portfolio of District templates, a typology of city districts, each of them associated to a set of retrofitting strategies -from light to deep renovation- including the related investments and expected energy savings. The objective is to help cities identify their districts with the most-suited trade-off between retrofitting investments and resulting energy savings.

First district templates developed on the city of Bolzano

The district templates are designed as models of city districts, defined by a set of characteristics influencing their energy profiles - district configuration and buildings shapes and ages being the key parameters.

DOWEL first experimented the approach on a dataset provided by the city of Bolzano (Italy), pre-processed by EURAC (European Academy of Bolzano), and then compiled and aggregated using the free and Open Source geographic information system QGIS. Those steps allowed to determine thirteen different districts types. Then, their respective energy consumption was simulated using the CROCUS tool, and the potential energy savings were calculated for several retrofitting strategies.

The approach was then duplicated with the city of Innsbruck (Austria). A ‘district template’ is provided for each type of district encountered in SINFONIA. It includes typical baseline consumption and a set of recommended refurbishment solutions (and associated impact).

These templates can be a useful tool to guide cities on how to make decisions before implementing a retrofitting project, which can be especially useful in countries were cities have less expertise in energy efficiency.