Geospatial Technologies to Improve Urban Energy Efficiency

The HEAT (Home Energy Assessment Technologies) pilot project is a FREE Geoweb mapping service, designed to empower the urban energy efficiency movement by allowing residents to visualize the amount and location of waste heat leaving their homes and communities as easily as clicking on their house in Google Maps. HEAT incorporates Geospatial solutions for residential waste heat monitoring using Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA) and Canadian built Thermal Airborne Broadband Imager technology (TABI-320) to provide users with timely, in-depth, easy to use, location-specific waste-heat information; as well as opportunities to save their money and reduce their green-house-gas emissions. We first report on the HEAT Phase I pilot project which evaluates 368 residences in the Brentwood community of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and describe the development and implementation of interactive waste heat maps, energy use models, a Hot Spot tool able to view the 6+ hottest locations on each home and a new HEAT Score for inter-city waste heat comparisons. We then describe current challenges, lessons learned and new solutions as we begin Phase II and scale from 368 to 300,000+ homes with the newly developed TABI-1800. Specifically, we introduce a new object-based mosaicing strategy, an adaptation of Emissivity Modulation to correct for emissivity differences, a new Thermal Urban Road Normalization (TURN) technique to correct for scene-wide microclimatic variation. We also describe a new Carbon Score and opportunities to update city cadastral errors with automatically defined thermal house objects.