Researchers have built a Wallonia Energy Atlas that estimates when 1.69 million buildings in Belgium's Wallonia region use heat and electricity. By converting annual records into hourly demand profiles, the atlas helps planners locate possible energy demand before commissioning detailed studies. Its hourly values are modelled estimates, not readings from every building's meter.
The model starts with cadastral records, which describe individual properties, and combines them with regional energy totals and typical building categories. This links detailed local information with the broader totals used to estimate annual consumption. The atlas covers homes, service-sector buildings and industry, including estimates for heating and cooling.
Annual totals cannot show when a network faces its busiest hours. To distribute them across the year, the team assigned BDEW load profiles, standardized schedules developed for German energy users, to each building category. The resulting hourly estimates can be combined at municipal, district, provincial or regional level and explored in an interactive application.
The category differences help explain what the map can show. Apartment buildings have greater average heat consumption than semi-detached houses, but building size and the number of homes within a building affect that comparison. The atlas also supplies values per unit of floor area. Its industrial examples show chemical plants with much larger heat and electricity requirements than residential buildings.
The researchers checked the model against seven monitored residential, service and industrial cases. Their average CV(RMSE), a measure of prediction error scaled to mean observed use, was about 27 percent. Those cases mainly checked heat and electricity consumption; they offered less direct support for the separate cooling and electric-heating estimates.
The hourly pattern also partly reflects the standardized schedule assigned to a building, so a predicted peak need not match that building's actual operating hours. The atlas supplies a consistent regional starting point for energy planning. A decision about a particular network or site still needs local measurements to test the assumed demand.