Towards Urban Facilities Energy Performance Evaluation Using Remote Sensing

Urban facilities are major contributors to annual energy consumption and therefore, evaluating their energy efficiency and retrofit planning play a major role in achieving sustainability goals. For urban facilities, such as buildings, energy performance audits could be conducted by detailed evaluation at building level. However, at urban level, detailed evaluation is cost and time intensive. Therefore, in this study, we investigated the correlation between land surface temperature, obtained through satellite imagery, and energy consumption patterns at urban level to explore its feasibility for energy performance evaluations. New York City was used as the main case study for conducting the analysis. We have investigated the correlation between energy consumption intensity and temperature at city block level for selected points. The outcome demonstrates a strong correlation between energy consumption intensity and land surface temperature. The observed correlation could potentially be leveraged for developing an approach for energy performance auditing.