Trial / Demo
IES VE software was used to build a community-level digital twin covering 192 buildings across a Turin city district, delivering a phased decarbonisation roadmap that projects an 83.7% reduction in carbon emissions by 2035 and providing city planners with a practical, data-driven tool for climate decision-making at scale.
From one building to a whole city: Scaling decarbonisation analysis
The TIPS4PED project represents a significant extension of how IES VE software is being applied, moving beyond individual building design and operation to address decarbonisation at the scale that climate commitments increasingly demand. The Turin district portfolio spans apartments, university buildings, offices, public administration, industrial units, and mixed community uses, each with its own baseline performance, retrofit potential, and carbon contribution. Modelling all 192 buildings within a single community-level digital twin, and sequencing interventions across a ten-year roadmap, required the kind of integrated, physics-based simulation that IES has developed for building-scale analysis, but applied at an order of magnitude higher.
The roadmap is structured around three staged interventions, sequenced to deliver progressively deeper carbon reductions while managing disruption and cost. Stage 1, targeting 2027, focuses on low-disruption demand-side improvements: LED lighting retrofits reducing average lighting loads from 15 W/m² to 4 W/m², and high-efficiency appliances cutting equipment energy by 42%. These measures alone avoid 2,513 tCO₂ annually against the baseline, with minimal impact on building fabric or heating systems.
Charting the biggest change: Full electrification of heat
Stage 2, targeted for 2030, delivers the largest single carbon reduction in the roadmap. A 65.6% cut against the 2025 baseline, achieved through the complete elimination of gas consumption across the district. Air-source heat pumps with a coefficient performance of approximately 2.95 replace legacy gas boilers for space heating, integrated heat pump water heaters replace gas-fired domestic hot water systems, and high-performance glazing reduces the U-value of windows from 4.9 to 1.4 W/m²K. Heating energy falls by 78%, DHW energy by 73%, and total district energy consumption drops from 115,141 MWh/yr to 41,946 MWh/yr, all from electricity, with zero gas remaining in the system.
Stage 3 completes the pathway by 2035, applying fabric-first deep retrofit measures, including external wall insulation reducing U-values from 1.02 to 0.26 W/m²K and roof insulation from 1.46 to 0.22 W/m²K. All designed to extract maximum benefit from the heat pump systems already installed in Stage 2. Heating demand falls a further 34% against Stage 2 levels, bringing total district emissions to 4,575 tCO₂/yr and total energy to 38,125 MWh/yr.
A planning tool, not just a study
What makes the Turin project particularly significant is not only the scale of analysis but the form in which the outputs have been delivered. The IES VE simulation data underpins an interactive planning dashboard that allows city stakeholders to compare scenarios, examine carbon and energy trends across the full roadmap timeline, and drill into building-type contributions to understand where interventions will have the greatest impact. That translation from simulation output to decision-support tool is precisely the kind of capability that municipalities and city authorities need as formal climate and carbon reduction commitments move from aspiration to implementation planning.
As portfolios, communities, and cities operate under increasingly formal decarbonisation targets, this type and scale of analysis is likely to become a standard use case for building performance simulation. The Turin roadmap demonstrates that the analytical foundations are already in place, and that IES software and consultancy services can support the transition from building-level insight to city-scale climate action.
