Energy Mapping of Existing Building Stock in Cambridge Using Energy Performance Certificates and Thermal Infrared Imagery

Both energy performance certificates (EPCs) and thermal infrared (TIR) images play key roles in mapping the energy performance of the urban building stock. In this paper, we developed parametric building archetypes using an EPC database and conducted temperature clustering on TIR images acquired from drones and satellite datasets. We evaluated 1,725 EPCs of existing building stock in Cambridge, UK, to generate energy consumption profiles. Drone-based TIR images of individual buildings in two Cambridge University colleges were processed using a machine learning pipeline for thermal anomaly detection and investigated the influence of two specific factors that affect the reliability of TIR for energy management applications: ground sample distance (GSD) and angle of view (AOV). The EPC results suggest that the construction year of the buildings influences their energy consumption. For example, modern buildings were over 30% more energy-efficient than older ones. In parallel, older buildings were found to show almost double the energy savings potential through retrofitting compared to newly constructed buildings. TIR imaging results showed that thermal anomalies can only be properly identified in images with a GSD of 1 m/pixel or less. A GSD of 1-6 m/pixel can detect hot areas of building surfaces. We found that a GSD > 6 m/pixel cannot characterize individual buildings but does help identify urban heat island effects. Additional sensitivity analysis showed that building thermal anomaly detection is more sensitive to AOV than to GSD. Our study informs newer approaches to building energy diagnostics using thermography and supports decision-making for large-scale retrofitting.