The Remote Sensing of Urban Energy Efficiency

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THE REMOTE SENSING OF URBAN ENERGY EFFICIENCY The world wastes more energy than it uses every year. It is estimated that the existing building stock consumes approximately 40% of the world's energy, of which 50% is wasted, while contributing to one third of planetary greenhouse gases (GHGs). Although energy-efficiency programs exist world-wide, most only measure energy consumption - not waste energy. This is because waste-energy is invisible to the human eye, and it's very difficult to measure, monitor, or manage something that we can't see. Yet, waste-energy is responsible for an estimated 50% of urban energy demand, but is missing from urban energy efficiency equations. In order to solve this challenge, the long-term goal of my research program is to evaluate whether high-resolution airborne thermal infrared (TIR) imagery acquired by the Canadian made TABI-1800 (Thermal Airborne Broadband Imager) can be used to quantify, map and monitor urban energy efficiency over time, at the resolution of individual houses, and the scale of a large Canadian city with over 1 million residents. We propose that this challenge can be met by achieving 3 short term goals: (i) To understand the effects that environmental and sensor related noise have on the raw thermal image and to develop and test methods to normalize their effects. (ii) To evaluate a combination of Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis and machine learning methods over very large and detailed thermal scenes, to better isolate the emitted TIR building signal from the background scene, resulting in improved heat-loss maps and measures specific to the building, rather than a mix of landscape features. (iii) To evolve the state-of-the-art in urban thermal infrared remote sensing by combining these improved heat-loss measures with building consumption data and machine learning to develop the first measures of urban energy efficiency directly from airborne TIR data for entire urban centres. By making energy efficiency visible for entire cities at the resolution of a single house, we envision the potential for residents and communities to save money, increase home comfort, reduce GHGs, support the development of a green economy (to fix inefficient homes), verify building construction quality and reduce the waste of expensive energy resources. This will also create new opportunities to promote Canadian leadership in urban energy efficiency and export Canadian TIR science and technology solutions world-wide.