An online interactive tool for the energy assessment of residential buildings and transportation

In the current context of increasing environmental awareness, energy efficiency is presented as a viable approach to the mitigation of climate change. In addition to public policies dealing with energy efficiency, heightening public awareness on the impact of citizens’ lifestyles and behaviours is crucial and could quickly lead to significant reductions in the total energy consumption of a territory. This paper presents a new online interactive tool which enables citizens, local authorities and private developers (1) to assess energy consumption in the building and transportation sectors, at the individual and at the neighbourhood scales; (2) to compare them and (3) to find relevant and personalized hints to reduce their energy consumptions. Numerous methods and tools including a typological classification of buildings, thermal dynamic simulations, life-cycle assessments, statistical treatments of national censuses, etc. were used and combined to build the database used in the online interactive tool. This tool makes the main results of a scientific research accessible to a large non-specialized audience which is crucial in the scope of the sustainable development.
Keywords: interactive tool, assessment methods, buildings, transportation, households, scientific popularization