Review and critical analysis of early-design phase evaluation metrics for the solar potential of neighborhood designs

摘要

The energy performance of a building is strongly influenced by its level of solar exposure, in turn affected by the climate, built context, and building morphological characteristics. Since these are typically fixed at the early-design phase, performance assessment methods based on solar considerations at the urban scale are essential to support early decision-making. As the adaptation of the well-developed building performance simulation methods to the urban scale lead to complexity issues, it is of interest to verify whether simpler metrics can act as performance indicators, as is often done at the building level with quantities such as form factor.