Quantifying Installed Cooling Capacities Using Aerial Images

Estimating cooling capacities from aerial images using convolutional neural networks

“…Reducing CO2 emissions in the cooling sector requires both the use of eco-friendly technologies and the centralization of the cooling supply of urban areas [7]. Efficient technologies, such as low-temperature district heating and cooling systems and seasonal aquifer thermal energy storage (ATES) systems can significantly mitigate greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional methods and reduce dependency on fossil fuels [8,9,10,11,12].…”

“…To implement such technologies on a larger scale and to design policies, information about site-specific cooling demands is needed [20,21]. Currently the scientific focus is mainly on modelling and quantifying heating demands, while cooling demands are often disregarded [7,22]. However, simultaneous or seasonal heating and cooling demands in an area hold important potential for synergies and should therefore ideally be considered together [9,11,23].…”

“…Information about the cooling demand in Europe is rare, as energy consumption of air conditioning is not officially monitored and rather difficult to quantify [7,20,24,25,26,27,28,29]. In the past, the cooling demand was modelled based on a large variety of factors.…”

“…However, in the EU, only a small proportion of theoretical cooling demand is met in practice with only 10% of households using air conditioning [1,4,20]. This low saturation rate makes it difficult to spatially quantify Europe's actually met cooling demand by using statistical models [7,18]. While most studies focus on large areas where low AC saturation rates have less of an impact on model accuracy, the Monte Carlo models by Li et al [22] and Chambers et al [32] predict the present and future probability for the presence of air conditioning on building level.…”

“…In 2021, Schüppler et al published a workflow to identify the condenser of ACCs from aerial images and to estimate their nominal cooling capacity of the ACC from the number of build-in condenser fans [7]. Compared to other methods, this approach is based on readily available data, and the method is not limited to specific building sectors.…”