Nation-scale building energy modeling for urban heat island assessment using the AutoBEM framework

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has released energy models and associated datasets for more than 120 million U.S. buildings. This study presents an integrated framework for Urban Heat Island (UHI) analysis that leverages these datasets and enhanced capabilities of the Automatic Building Energy Modeling (AutoBEM) suite. The framework couples building-scale simulation with multi-scale spatial analysis to support urban Anthropogenic Heat Emission (AHE) studies and inform UHI mitigation planning. We demonstrate the approach in Maricopa County, Arizona, simulating 1.35 million buildings and examining projected energy consumption and rejected heat across factors including building type, construction vintage, fuel type, population, and income. The integrated AutoBEM component enables comprehensive, building-specific evaluations, revealing significant emission disparities across building types and locations based on U.S. Department of Energy–recommended settings. Contextual spatial analyses visualize emissions across urban districts, providing actionable insight to target UHI hot spots at community scales for detailed mitigation. These context-specific insights can inform targeted retrofitting strategies, guide urban planning policies, and engage local communities via a web interface that supports building-level queries of heat emissions and energy use. While not intended as precise representations of real-world distributions, results can be rapidly refined as additional ground-truth and environmental data become available.