Integration of aerial thermography and energy performance certificates for the estimation of energy consumption in cities

• Geospatial information may support energy policies at city level. • A new informed thermography-based method for energy performance assessment. • Comparison between literature-based method and the new proposed approach. • The new method improved the accuracy up to 80 %. • Potential for multi-scale building energy performance assessment is demonstrated. Based on the major role of the building sector in the energy transition, multiple policies on the topic have been issued at the European level, resulting in a need for methodologies to support energy retrofitting campaigns. Based on a preliminary segmentation of the building stock in terms of year of construction and surface-to-volume, this study aims to model the energy demand of buildings at urban scale from the integration of data elaborated from the available Energy Performance Certificates with thermographic data returning the actual heat losses of the buildings. The new proposed approach proved to be more reliable than methods currently available in the literature, providing energy performance classification of all buildings with 80 % accuracy. Conclusions remark on the potential of such analysis, with ready-made solutions to be used by Public Administrations for city-scale energy assessments, thus making them able to comply with European legislation and – potentially – design Renewable Energy Communities.