Evolution of and additional functionalities to the city energy planning platform MEU

The MEU GIS-enabled web-platform has been developed in close collaboration with four Swiss cities: it enables detailed monitoring and planning for both energy demand and supply at individual building and neighborhood level (http://meu.epfl.ch). Whereas the first version of the MEU platform allowed launching calculations for only up to several hundreds of buildings at a time, the refactored version presently gives access to entire cities comprising several thousands of buildings with the same level of detail. On one hand, the code architecture has been thoroughly revised and consolidated while, on the other hand, the databases for the four partner cities are being completed, checked, corrected and eventually made completely available for several years. A large test campaign is thus underway on the refactored version of the MEU platform. In the upcoming months, the latter will present all the functionalities of the prototype version, i.e. include the construction and evaluation of complex energy scenarios. New functionalities are concomitantly being added to the MEU platform, in particular at the level of the energy networks. Indeed, in the prototype version, the latter were only displayed but no network attributes (except geo-referencing) were neither introduced nor used in calculations. The envisioned new functionalities will enable to start filling this important usability gap by adding network detailed attributes to the database structure and by allowing pre-dimensioning calculations based on selected energy scenarios and including the networks characteristics (available power, temperatures/pressures, limiting dimensions, aso.). The energy supply side aspects will thus be quantitatively be taken into account, along with the implications in terms of network extension/densification precisely determined. The natural gas network, which is – and shall continue to be - broadly present in all four partner cities, representing up to 30 % of the overall final territorial energy consumption, will be used as the first test case, in close collaboration with local multi-energy utilities.