A review and reflection on open datasets of city-level building energy use and their applications

Data related to building energy use fuels the research and applications on building energy efficiency, which is an essential measure to address global energy and environmental challenges. However, in most cities, there is a lack of comprehensive and publicly accessible building energy use datasets with necessary temporal and spatial granularities to support urban building energy modeling, regional energy planning, city-level building performance benchmarking, and policymaking on building energy efficiency. Data owners and governments are facing challenges in determining which and how building energy use data should be disclosed at the city level and how to protect data privacy. This review paper provides insights to answer these questions based on a comprehensive and critical review of worldwide open datasets and their applications in the built environment context. Detailed information about the collected 33 building energy datasets is summarized and categorized. Studies identified into 11 subdomains using these open datasets are critically analyzed and compared. Potential policy implications based on the studies are also proposed. Moreover, non-energy datasets that are frequently used in research relevant to urban building energy use are also introduced. Solutions to privacy issues are discussed to address concerns from data publishers. Finally, significant conclusions are made to support the proper disclosure of city-level building energy data. This review study is valuable to urban building energy data disclosure, urban building energy modeling, and data-driven energy policymaking.