Residential Building Stock in Piedmont, Lazio, and Sicily – Developing a National Classification for Energy Modeling

This thesis develops a hybrid classification to make Italy’s regional building maps more useful for energy analysis. Piedmont, Lazio and Sicily were used as examples because their technical maps differ greatly in detail, structure and reference year. To bring them onto the same page, I cleaned and harmonised their uso fields, building footprints and height information (from regional datasets, DTM/DEM and GHSL), and merged everything into one consistent geodatabase. The hybrid classes extend the usual R/P/S/T categories with a small number of energy-relevant sub-types, especially in the residential sector. This helps translate very different local labels into a compact, nationally applicable scheme that still reflects how buildings are used in practice. Once classified, the building stock was linked with provincial residential electricity data from ARERA to derive simple hourly demand profiles and to describe spatial differences in residential behaviour across regions. The results show that this hybrid approach offers a clearer and more interpretable picture of the residential stock than treating all dwellings as one group. It also makes visible how the uneven detail of the original maps affects classification outcomes and the confidence of later analyses. Even with imperfect data, a careful harmonisation and classification process already improves the usability of regional building maps for residential energy modelling and future REC-related applications.