Abstract

The study investigates the impact of climate on the residential building energy performance and its relationship with urban built form and geometry of the built environment. It aims to identify the most energetically sustainable urban built form and optimal urban geometry in different climates that results in higher energy performance of buildings. Geometrical models of four urban built forms are developed, and a simulation method is used to conduct sensitivity analyses over the four case studies (cities of London, Singapore, Helsinki and Phoenix) that are selected based on specific climatic criteria. The Energy Equity (EE) indicator is used for demonstration of the results, which simultaneously considers the amount of building energy demand as well as energy generation by building-mounted PVs. The results show that increasing the cut-off angle (i.e., reducing buildings distance) reduces building energy demand in cooling-dominated buildings (i.e., in Singapore and Phoenix) between 6% and 56% while increases building energy demand in heating-dominated buildings (i.e., in London and Helsinki) between 2% and 16.5%. Hence, the impact of distance between buildings on building energy demand is more significant in hot climates. In general, building energy demand in London is the lowest among the case studies, while it is the highest in Singapore (up to 219% higher than London). London also shows the highest value of EE (demonstrating the best energy performance) and Helsinki shows the lowest (up to 51% lower than London). It is recommended to use the tunnel-court built form to have a more energy-efficient buildings, specifically in hot climates.