Energy neutral neighbourhoods

Abstract

The building sector accounts for 30% of the total energy consumption worldwide, which has a large potential for improvement in energy demand (OECD/IEA, 2015). In the Netherlands a large part of the building stock are existing houses and that eventually need to be transformed to become energy neutral. The scale of the neighbourhood makes it possible to bring inhabitants, the city and building level together. Not only electricity, heating and cooling demand is considered in this research, also transport is regarded as an important energy consumer of households. Energy demand can be reduced by improving energy performance of the buildings with measures such as insulation. Modern technologies such as electric vehicles and heat pumps, make it possible to move away from petrol and gas, which could decrease the annual energy demand significantly. Most of the current electricity is centrally produced in a power plant. Energy from renewable sources can be produced on‐site. Due to the intermittent character of local renewable energy generation, the stress on the grid could increase (Koch, Girard, & McKoen, 2012). Local grid problems can be prevented by introducing a microgrid (Ustun, Ozansoy, & Zayegh, 2011). A microgrid makes it possible to match distributed energy generation with local demands. The electrification of technologies such as heat pumps and electric vehicles can cause increasing peak demands on the electricity grid. This will result in more interconnection between the heating, transport and electricity sector among other things. Using an integral approach, the relationship between the built environment and energy sector was explored in this research. It was shown that the primary energy demand in the case study neighbourhood in Rotterdam could be reduced with 45% with measures such as strong insulation, heat pumps, solar panels and electric vehicles. In the worst case scenario this would lead to an increase in peak demand of 4.1 times the current situation. By improving the physical design variables in the built environment, this peak demand was reduced with 40%, which is 2.6 times the peak demand of the current situation.