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3DStock: A national digital twin for decarbonising the UK's building stock
26 May 2020
3DStock has been developed by the Building Stock Lab at UCL Energy Institute to provide a better understanding of the UK's building stock in the transition to carbon neutrality.
3DStock is a method for modelling all buildings – domestic, non-domestic and mixed-use – in a locality, in three dimensions and located geographically.
The primary purpose is the analysis of energy performance, but there are many other potential applications.
Models have been built to date of 18 London boroughs and the towns and cities of Sheffield, Leicester, Swindon, Tamworth and Milton Keynes. Data are available for extending the modelling to England and Wales.
How 3DStock works
The models are assembled automatically from Ordnance Survey digital maps, commercial rating data from the Valuation Office agency (VOA), LiDAR data (laser measurements made by overflying aircraft) from the Environment Agency, and several other sources. Activites are recorded in detail, floor by floor and in many instances down to the room level. Floor areas are given by the VOA data, or are otherwise estimated from the external geometry of buildings. Actual metered energy data are attached at the premises/ building level where these are available, as in Display Energy Certificates; or aggregated to postcodes, LSOs or larger areal units. Energy Performance Certificates are also attached to premises/ buildings. Geometry and activity data can be passed from 3DStock to a second model, SimStock, with which energy performance can be estimated using dynamic simulation, for large populations of buildings.