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 re search, a typology of urban blocks is drawn up for the urban area of Liege through the use of GIS tools in order to asse ss energy uses of residential buildings and transport of resi dents at the city scale. For each class of this typology, a repr esentative block is selected in order to model energy use at t he city scale, as well as to consider the possible evolution of th e city energy consumption and to simulate the effects of some str ategies 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 Liege 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.