Assessing household energy uses: An online interactive tool dedicated to citizens and local stakeholders

- A methodology is presented that assesses residential energy uses precisely.
- Building energy uses are crossed with sustainability indicators.
- An online interactive tool dedicated to citizens is presented.
- The tool makes scientific results accessible to a non-specialized audience.
- Feedback from users was quite positive.

This paper presents the SOLEN integrated online tool, dedicated to citizens and local authorities. This methodology, developed to allow precise energy assessment (heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, appliances, and cooking but also local production of renewable energy) of household energy uses, is firstly introduced. SOLEN uses a typological classification of buildings and thermal simulations. Many parameters are defined and taken into account to capture the specificities of numerous types of buildings exhaustively (e.g. type of buildings; number of floors; common ownership; orientation; thermal performances of the walls, floors, roofs, and windows; and ventilation type). These results related to building energy consumption are then crossed, in an integrated approach, with several indicators of urban sustainability, to take into account in the balance of the impact of the location of buildings on transportation energy consumption or the impact of the urban form on the production of solar renewable energy. This tool makes accessible to a large non-specialized audience the results of a three-year scientific research study in Wallonia (Belgium) and was awarded an Energy Globe Award (Belgium) in 2014. The first feedback from users is presented to conclude this contribution.