Inter-building effect: Simulating the impact of a network of buildings on the accuracy of building energy performance predictions

Given the significant energy consumption imputable to buildings, the development of accurate models to predict building energy performance to understand their environmental impact has become a fundamental research issue. In this paper, a method for evaluating a building’s energy performance by enlarging the assessment perspective from a single building to a network of buildings is proposed and applied. The purpose of this research was to establish how a combined Inter-Building Effect (IBE) on energy consumption could work and how it could condition buildings’ energy performance when there are close spatial relationships among buildings. To examine this, a simulation of the energy performance of a whole network of buildings represented by a realistic block of twenty single-family homes subject to different climatological contexts was conducted. The results demonstrate that buildings can mutually impact the energy dynamics of other buildings and that this effect varies by climatological context and by season. The IBE analysis and the specific proposed methodology revealed energy requirement modeling inaccuracies of up to 42% in summer (in Miami, FL) and up to 22% in winter (in Minneapolis, MN). These findings demonstrate that in order to accurately predict the energy performance of a single building, the IBE created by the spatial relationship with surrounding buildings should be considered.