City Energy Management : A Case Study on the Area of Liège in Belgium

Within the framework of sustainable development,
it is important to take into account environmental aspects of
urban areas related to their energy use. In this research, a
typology of urban blocks is drawn up for the urban area of
Liège through the use of GIS tools in order to assess energy
uses of residential buildings and transport of residents at the
city scale. For each class of this typology, a representative
block is selected in order to model energy use at the city scale,
as well as to consider the possible evolution of the city energy
consumption and to simulate the effects of some strategies of
urban renewal. An application study on the residential
buildings energy consumption part of this typology is given to
compare different energy management strategies. This case
study allow to conclude that the European Directive on the
Energy Performance of Buildings and even more selective
energy policies on new buildings are not sufficient to widely
decrease the energy consumption of Liège building stock but
that renovation of the existing building stock has a much
larger positive impact on city energy consumption reductions.
These conclusions put forward the benefits of using urban GIS
for policymaking and city management. Energy management is
an important GIS application field.