A preliminary simulation study about the impact of COVID-19 crisis on energy demand of a building mix at a district in Sweden

The COVID-19 outbreak is exacerbating uncertainty in energy demand. This paper aims to investigate the impact of the confined measures due to COVID-19 outbreak on energy demand of a building mix in a district. Three levels of confinement for occupant schedules are proposed based on a new district design in Sweden. The Urban Modeling Interface tool is applied to simulate the energy performance of the building mix. The boundary conditions and input parameters are set up according to the Swedish building standards and statistics. The district is at early-design stage, which includes a mix of building functions, i.e. residential buildings, offices, schools and retail shops. By comparing with the base case (normal life without confinement measures), the average delivered electricity demand of the entire district increases in a range of 14.3% to 18.7% under the three confinement scenarios. However, the mean system energy demands (sum of heating, cooling, and domestic hot water) decreases in a range of 7.1% to 12.0%. These two variation nearly cancel each other out, leaving the total energy demand almost unaffected. The result also shows that the delivered electricity demands in all cases have a relatively smooth variation across a year, while the system energy demands follow the principle trends for all the cases, which have peak demands in winter and much lower demands in transit seasons and summer. This study represents a first step in the understanding of the energy performance for community buildings when they confront with this kind of shock.