Impact of time resolution on estimation of energy savings using a copula-based calibration in UBEM

Urban Building Energy modelling (UBEM) has emerged in the last decade as an important tool to accelerate energy transition in the building sector. To fulfil one of its major purposes - forecasting energy savings for potential energy conservation measures at an urban scale, several challenges are still to be addressed. Two key challenges include: 1) the need to calibrate models with a large number of unknown parameters across numerous buildings (either individually or through archetype representation); 2) the limited availability of high-resolution measured data, which raises concerns about calibrated models based solely on yearly values for accurate energy savings forecast. This study addresses these challenges using a case study of 35 buildings in a district in Stockholm, Sweden. Firstly, a new iterative Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) method for calibration is proposed, incorporating a copula-based sampling process at each iteration. Secondly, the new calibration process is applied with three different time resolutions to examine the impact of data resolution on forecasted energy usage, particularly when applied to a classical energy conservation measure. Results demonstrate the efficiency of the new method across the 35 buildings, facilitating the rapid population of a final joint distribution for the nine unknown parameters considered in each building. While the marginals may be strongly influenced by the time resolution, the forecasted energy consumption remains identical across the three analysed time resolutions. However, a noticeable difference is observed when the ECM pertains to a formerly unknown or known parameter.