Applying any sustainable intervention in the urban energy system requires fundamental knowledge of the energy demand dynamics. Only when we can predict the users' energy demand at any given time with accuracy, we can redesign the urban energy system. Accordingly, the main objective of this paper is to determine the annual electricity usage of the building connections in the urban built environment. In this paper firstly through a literature review, the important electricity usage explanatory variables of the built environment are recognized. For each building, besides the annual electricity usage, three major categories of explanatory variables, including physical, socioeconomic, and geospatial characteristics are determined. Based on the available data sources, a building electricity usage database is created. The database is categorized based on the two most frequently used building sectors including residential and non-residential. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) technique is applied to the constructed database to estimate the predicting model parameters establishing a relationship between the annual electricity usage as a dependent variable and physical, socioeconomic, and geospatial variables as independent variables. In this research, to determine the contribution of geospatial characteristics in the annual electricity usage variability, regression analysis is performed in two consecutive steps. In the first step only, the geospatial characteristics were implemented in the multiple linear regression analysis. Following that, in the second step, the other categories including physical and socioeconomic characteristics are added to the model. The result revealed that in both building sectors most of the predictors are statistically significant at the 0.05 level. While for the residential buildings the geospatial characteristics account for 9.7% of the electricity usage variation, these values for the service and industry sub-sectors are 9.9% and 8.7% respectively. In total, all variables explain 28.1%, 39.4%, and 42.9% of the electricity usage variability of residential, service, and industrial buildings respectively.

Wind turbine site planning is a multidisciplinary task comprising of several stakeholder groups from different domains and with different priorities. An information system capable of integrating the knowledge on the multiple aspects of a wind turbine plays a crucial role on providing a common picture to the involved groups. In this study, we have developed an interactive and intuitive 3D system (Falcon) for planning wind turbine locations. This system supports iterative design loops (wind turbine configurations), based on the emerging field of geodesign. The integration of GIS, game engine and the analytical models has resulted in an interactive platform with real-time feedback on the multiple wind turbine aspects which performs efficiently for different use cases and different environmental settings. The implementation of tiling techniques and open standard web services support flexible and on-the-fly loading and querying of different (massive) geospatial elements from different resources. This boosts data accessibility and interoperability that are of high importance in a multidisciplinary process. The incorporation of the analytical models in Falcon makes this system independent from external tools for different environmental impacts estimations and results in a unified platform for performing different environmental analysis in every stage of the scenario design. Game engine techniques, such as collision detection, are applied in Falcon for the real-time implementation of different environmental models (e.g. noise and visibility). The interactivity and real-time performance of Falcon in any location in the whole country assist the stakeholders in the seamless exploration of various scenarios and their resulting environmental effects and provides a scope for an interwoven discussion process. The flexible architecture of the system enables the effortless application of Falcon in other countries, conditional to input data availability. The embedded open web standards in Falcon results in a smooth integration of different input data which are increasingly available online and through standardized access mechanisms.

In this study, we propose an interactive information system for wind turbine siting, considering its visual and sound externalities. This system is an integration of game engine, GIS and analytical sound propagation model in a unified 3D web environment. The game engine–GIS integration provides a 3D virtual environment where users can navigate through the existing geospatial data of the whole country and place different wind turbine types to explore their visual impact on the landscape. The integration of a sound propagation model in the game engine–GIS supports the real-time calculation and feedback regarding wind turbine sound at the surrounding buildings. The platform's GIS component enables massive (on-the-fly) georeferenced data utilization through tiling techniques as well as data accessibility and interoperability via cloud-based architecture and open geospatial standard protocols. The game engine, on the other hand, supports performance optimization for both data display and sound model calculations.