NEBULA: A National Scale Dataset for Neighbourhood-Level Urban Building Energy Modelling for England and Wales

TL;DR

NEBULA is a comprehensive, large-scale dataset that enables detailed modelling of neighbourhood-level building energy consumption in England and Wales, supporting efforts to reduce emissions and achieve net zero targets.

Contribution

This paper introduces NEBULA, a novel, extensive dataset combining diverse urban and building data for small neighbourhoods, filling a critical data gap in Europe.

Findings

Contains 609,964 samples across England and Wales.

Integrates building, climate, urban, environmental, and socio-demographic data.

Enables detailed energy consumption modelling at neighbourhood scale.

Abstract

Buildings are significant contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 26% of global energy sector emissions in 2022. Meeting net zero goals requires a rapid reduction in building emissions, both directly from the buildings and indirectly from the production of electricity and heat used in buildings. National energy planning for net zero demands both detailed and comprehensive building energy consumption data. However, geo-located building-level energy data is rarely available in Europe, with analysis typically relying on anonymised, simulated or low-resolution data. To address this problem, we introduce a dataset of Neighbourhood Energy, Buildings, and Urban Landscapes (NEBULA) for modelling domestic energy consumption for small neighbourhoods (5-150 households). NEBULA integrates data on building characteristics, climate, urbanisation, environment, and socio-demographics and contains 609,964 samples across England and Wales.