A high resolution urban energy atlas for spatiotemporal energy-demand assessment of 1.69 million buildings

Nematchoua, Modeste Kameni, Wiberg, Aoife Houlihan, Orosa, Jose A., Attia, Shadi, Donatien, Njomo, MacLeod, David ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5504-6450, Asadi, Somayeh, Roshan, Gholamreza and Reiter, Sigrid 2026. A high resolution urban energy atlas for spatiotemporal energy-demand assessment of 1.69 million buildings. Scientific Reports 10.1038/s41598-026-71587-y

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Abstract

The building sector is central to achieving climate neutrality because of its major contribution to final energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. However, regional energy planning remains constrained by the lack of high-resolution spatial and temporal datasets capable of simultaneously representing residential, tertiary and industrial buildings. This study develops a high-resolution interactive Wallonia Energy Atlas that combines cadastral information, regional energy statistics, building archetypes and standardized temporal load profiles. The proposed methodology combines detailed cadastral information for approximately 1.69 million buildings with regional energy statistics and building archetypes to estimate annual energy indicators using a hybrid top-down/bottom-up approach. These annual estimates are subsequently reconstructed into 8,760-hour profiles using standardized BDEW load profiles for five energy indicators: Heat Consumption (HC), Heat Demand (HD), Electricity Consumption (EC), Cooling Electricity Demand (CED) and Heating Electricity Consumption (HEC). The resulting energy data were spatially aggregated at four administrative levels (regional, provincial, arrondissement and municipal), covering 5 provinces, 20 arrondissements and 262 municipalities, and implemented within an interactive web application developed using Python, Dash and Plotly. The reconstructed hourly profiles show substantial differences in energy magnitude and temporal distribution among building categories. At the aggregate building level, average hourly heat consumption ranges from 3.33 kWh for semi-detached houses to 18.53 kWh for apartment buildings; these absolute values reflect differences in building size and dwelling aggregation and are therefore complemented by area-normalized energy intensities. In the tertiary sector, transportation facilities record the highest electricity demand (40.07 kWh), whereas culture and sport buildings present the largest average heat consumption (18.26 kWh). Industrial facilities display considerably greater modelled energy requirements, with chemical industries reaching average hourly heat and electricity consumptions of 7,275.5 kWh and 2,843.0 kWh, respectively. Validation against seven monitored residential, tertiary and industrial cases showed a mean CV(RMSE) of approximately 27%, although the monitored cases primarily provide empirical evaluation of HC and EC. Load-duration analysis shows distinct reconstructed temporal patterns across sectors, with stronger seasonal variation in residential profiles, schedule-related patterns in tertiary profiles, and relatively persistent loads in industrial profiles; these temporal characteristics are partly inherited from the assigned BDEW archetypes. The Wallonia Energy Atlas therefore provides a regional-scale integration of cadastral data, annual energy estimates, standardized temporal profiles, multi-scale GIS aggregation and interactive visualization, supporting preliminary energy-system planning and regional decarbonisation assessment.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	In Press
Schools:	Schools > Earth and Environmental Sciences Schools > Physical, Chemical & Environmental Sciences
Publisher:	Nature Research
ISSN:	2045-2322
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	29 September 2026
Date of Acceptance:	10 September 2026
Last Modified:	29 Sep 2026 09:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/189861

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