Integrated Residential Household Energy Consumption and GHG Emissions Modelling at Metropolitan Scale

Urban-scale policy, planning and development decisions can have significant resource use and environmental impacts. The energy consumption and related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of residential households, in particular, are mostly due to their housing and transport energy consumption. At the metropolitan scale, the type and location (or distribution) of housing can have a significant impact on the region’s total energy and emissions profile. This paper presents a bottom-up methodology for assessing the impacts of alternative urban forms on the urban energy and GHG emissions footprint, combining housing and transport energy consumption across all households in the study area. The integrated assessment is built around a common household typology, and then extends separately towards housing energy consumption (based on sub-typologies of housing type and age, enduse demand categories and supply) and transport energy consumption profiles. The impact of the spatial distribution of households can be assessed from small geographical levels (comprising of about 200 - 250 households) to the whole municipality or Local Government Area (LGA), and to the whole metropolitan scale (i.e. all of the 31 LGAs in Metropolitan Melbourne). We present herein the calculation and validation of the total baseline energy consumption, and related GHG emissions of all households in Metropolitan Melbourne in the census year 2011. This approach can be used in the next stage to assess the impacts of alternative urban forms into the future.