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Recently, the attention towards Urban Building Energy Modelling has been growing due to the large contribution of cities on the worldwide energy consumption rate. In fact, many models have been developed to simulate buildings and urban energy systems. This article presents a new open-source tool for city-scale simulations. The platform implements the electrical analogy to model buildings thermal behaviour through resistance-capacitance networks, thus predicting the energy demand of urban areas with a bottom-up approach and low computational resources. The model has been applied to two urban areas: a small and well-known neighbourhood and a broader urban district. Results show the accordance of simplified models with respect to single building detailed simulations in the evaluation of the seasonal energy demand. When comparing results at hourly resolution, the accuracy is increased by considering a thermal network that splits buildings' surfaces into two capacitances. A model based on a single capacitance leads to a higher deviation, especially on the daily peak power. Regarding the district simulation, these simplified networks show a good prediction of the buildings energy demand according to relevant European references, thus demonstrating the reliability of the proposed approach despite their low computational effort. • EUReCA, an UBEM platform based on lumped-capacitance building models is presented. • EUReCA handles both 2D shapefiles and 3D CityJSON georeferenced data. • A restricted well-known neighbourhood and a wider city district are analyzed. • A two-capacitances building model enhances power peak and load profile prediction. • Aggregated results at district level demonstrate EUReCA's reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the cooling energy demand in urban areas is increasing ever faster due to the global warming and the growth of developing economies. In this perspective, the urban building energy modelling community is focusing its research activities on innovative tools and policy actions to improve cities' sustainability. This work aims to present a novel module of the EUReCA (Energy Urban Resistance Capacitance Approach) platform for evaluating the effects of the interaction between district's buildings in the cooling season. EUReCA predicts the urban energy demand using a bottom-up approach and low computational resources. The new module allows us to evaluate the mutual shading between buildings and the urban heat island effects, and it is well integrated with the calculation of the energy demand of buildings. The analysis was carried out considering a real case study in Padua (Italy). Results show that the urban heat island causes an average increase of 2.2 °C in the external air temperature mainly caused by the waste heat rejected from cooling systems. This involves an increase in urban cooling energy and electricity demand, which can be affected between 6 and 8%. The latter is the most affected by the urban heat island (UHI), due to the degradation it causes on the HVAC systems' efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]