Development and demonstration of a renewable energy based demand/supply decision support tool for the building design profession

Future cities are likely to be characterised by a greater level of renewable energy systems deployment. Maximum impact will be achieved when such systems are used to offset local energy demands in contrast to current philosophy dictating the grid connection of large schemes. This paper reports on the development of a software tool, MERIT, for demand/ supply matching. The purpose of MERIT is to assist with the deployment of renewable energy systems at all scales. This paper describes the procedures used to match heterogeneous supply technologies to a set of demand profiles corresponding to the different possible fuel types.