The development of building archetypes for the energy modeling of the Italian building stock: preliminary results for Southern Italy

Over the last 10 years, new tools have been developed that are capable of evaluating energy saving measures for large building stocks through dynamic simulations involving numerous buildings at the same time. These tools, called Urban Building Energy Models (UBEMs), require, however, reference buildings to provide reliable results. A reference building, called an archetype, is a virtual building that represents a significant part of the building stock; in UBEMs, reference buildings are associated with a geometry typically provided by GIS instrumentation and with thermal and energy features retrieved from a range of sources (e.g., census data, energy cadastre, energy performance certificates). The PRIN 2020 “URBEM” project aims to fill the current knowledge gap about the energy performances of urban buildings by providing a national database of archetypes for use with UBEM tools. As a step of this research effort, the current paper first presents the statistical methodology applied to the analysis of available data sets regarding building fabric, building systems and energy use of residential buildings located in Calabria and Sicily. Then, based on a filtering and clustering procedure involving different climate zones and construction periods, exemplary archetypes are derived to be used in various UBEMs, which could eventually be exploited by public authorities to develop energy policies and incentives to improve the efficiency of real estate assets