Multi-Energy Planning of Urban District Retrofitting

In city contexts it is common to encounter entire urban districts with poor energy performances buildings, where urban and building retrofitting can be carried out ranging from light to radical transformation. Taking into account that the Clean energy package for All Europeans, which defines European climate and energy policy beyond 2020, encourages the Member States to develop policies, financial measures, and other tools for the promotion of strategies that can lead to building renovation, this paper wants to provide a multi-energy planning methodology for an entire urban neighborhood. The development of a district's multi-energy smart grid has been planned with the objective of increasing the local production from local renewable thermal and electrical energy to decrease the gap between energy production and consumption of the district. The investment cost is considered as objective for multi-energy system optimization. The proposed methodology is applied to an existing urban district in the City of Cagliari (Italy) considering different retrofitting scenarios. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.