TRNSYS – UMI

A composition of tools that add up to a physical model of buildings and communities, including their energy systems (centralized or decentralized), from HVAC systems to district energy. Currently TRNSYS has been applied to individual buildings and small communities (order of magnitude: tens of buildings), and a research project is in progress to apply it to the Québec residential buildings stock. UMI has been applied to neighborhoods (order of magnitude: 100 buildings).

Depending on the scale, local (borough) policies for district energy, provincial/federal policies for building standards or incentives (through archetypes as a proxy for the building stock), demand-response control strategies.

Provide guidance to local policy makers for specific neighborhoods (e.g. in Montréal).

Bottom-up approaches are costly to scale up but can quantify the impact of physical changes to the buildings (e.g. better insulation, better HVAC systems), advanced control strategies (e.g. for demand response), so the models could be used to assess this type of measures and to inform assumptions made in higher-level models.

The model can assess strategies and programs for urban planning, taxes or incentives for building envelope improvement, HVAC system improvements, and distributed renewable generation – although not a “policy” the assessment of demand response or energy flexibility potential seems important to me.

Mostly researchers, consultants (for individual buildings), local planning authorities (e.g. for UMI) but not directly, through consulting with researchers or specialists. Local/city policy makers, if scaled up to provincial level organisms such as Transition Énergétique Québec.

Detailed hourly or 15-min energy use of individual buildings within a geographical boundary