UBASE – Urban Benchmarking Action for Sustainable Energy

Rapid urbanisation means that by 2030, 60% of India’s population (590 million people) will be living in cities, putting immense pressure on the urban infrastructure systems, and requiring the construction of an additional 20 billion m2 of residential and 4 billion m2 of commercial accommodation.  Understanding India’s urban building stock and its energy demands is critical to ensuring that carbon emissions are managed through this period of dramatic change.  Energy Use Benchmarking is a key element of understanding both the energy consumption of the building stock and its potential for improvement.  Its correct application requires information about the characteristics of individual buildings such as age, use type and building materials.  Such data exists in contextual data sets like those held for property taxation purposes but the absence of a geocoded address system means that it is not possible to link these data to spatial datasets such as building geometries and location.

The UBASE project is a novel partnership which aims to transform our understanding of the Indian urban landscape. UCL and CEPT University are working with Delhivery, India’s leading full-service logistics provider to apply address disambiguation to geolocate ~1 million addresses in Ahmedabad’s municipal property tax records.  This data will be linked with the iNUMBER ultra-high resolution 3D model of the city to allow classification of the urban building stock by floor area, use type and age as well as modelled energy consumption.  In parallel, we are working with COL.EAD to develop a graduated energy use benchmarking system to identify and prioritise critical decarbonisation pathways for Ahmedabad.  Bentley Systems are a technology partner for the project.