Energy in the built environment

The energy transition plays out street by street. Which neighbourhoods can be heated by a district network, where do heat pumps make sense, what does either choice cost, and who pays for it? Those questions cannot be answered at the national level, because the answer changes with the age of the housing stock, the density of the street and what happens to be under the pavement.

Our work here is the spatial half of that problem: matching projected demand in the built environment to the local and zonal options for supplying it.

Vesta

Developed together with PBL, Vesta is a spatially explicit model of the built environment and horticulture, looking ahead to 2050. It computes the techno-economic potential of energy saving measures, renewable supply and heat networks, and what those choices would mean for the gas, heat and electricity infrastructure.

The model distinguishes measures at the building from measures at the area level, and can work out which combination and sequence is most cost-effective given local circumstances. Because those circumstances vary enormously between regions, it runs on detailed spatial data, down to the address and building register.

Its best-known application is the Startanalyse aardgasvrije buurten and its 2025 update, which set out per neighbourhood what alternative heating strategies would deliver. We also built the web mapping for those results, so that a municipality can look up its own neighbourhoods rather than read a national average. Model versions are published at github.com/pbl-nl.

Hestia

Hestia is the successor, developed by TNO and PBL. It works at the level of the individual dwelling and covers the entire Dutch housing stock, with location, dwelling type, construction year, energy label and network connection per house.

That resolution buys two things. It can follow the stock as it changes, through new construction, demolition and policy measures. And it can compute not only the development of gas, electricity and heat consumption, but also the costs and benefits of the investments involved and how those fall to landlords, tenants and owners. Whether a measure is worthwhile is rarely a single number; it depends on who is paying and who is saving.

Results are meaningful for groups of dwellings rather than for individual addresses, which is worth stating plainly given how detailed the underlying data is.

Hestia is being synchronised with the RuimteScanner, so that the heating options of a neighbourhood can be evaluated for a projected future situation and not only for the one that exists today. See land use and spatial planning.

What we contribute

Our part is the spatial modelling and the data engineering underneath it: turning national registers into a consistent picture per building, computing at national scale without losing the detail, and making results available as maps that hold up in a council meeting. The energy domain is smaller for us than land use or the social domain, but it shares the same machinery, and the same principle that a result you cannot trace is not a result.