Potential of Renewable Energy Sources usage in an energy demand of a single-family houses neighbourhood, constituting an Energy Cluster – a case study

Worldwide policy referring to global warming and air pollution assumes several main guidelines, in which Renewable Energy Sources (RES) usage simultaneously with limitation of fossil fuels in energy production seems to be a major goal. Nowadays, the continuous growth of RES usage within final energy consumption is becoming an obvious part of many country’s development. Adding to that relentless pursuit for improvement of building energy efficiency results in prediction, that in nearest future one should expect the development of advanced city-scale areas constituting an Energy Cluster. The paradigm of Energy Cluster (EC) allows us to define an energy flexibility neighbourhood. This article presents the results of energy analysis of a model neighbourhood of single-family houses with possible usage of RES. The neighbourhood constituting an EC was defined considering the Polish household sector statistical study. The analyzed area consists of representative single-family houses of Poland, characterized by different built periods, building shape and geometry as well as building enclosure parameters. Within the analysis, a detailed examination of a defined EC was performed by means of TEAC – computer tool developed by authors. TEAC is based on the results of energy simulations obtained by means of Energy Plus software and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) usage. Artificial Intelligence (AI) was used for energy demand predictions of buildings. Among possible RES a detailed analysis of solar and wind energy usage was performed. As a result, we obtained an hourly energy demand space- and time distribution, RES outputs, ecological analysis concerning greenhouse gasses emission and profitability analysis of proposed modernizations for the neighbourhood.