International Teaching Programme — City Energy Analyst

Education

The CEA team has a great commitment to educate the current and the next generation of practitioners in the realm of energy systems analysis. We aim to train groups of students, researchers as well as experienced consultants in the forefront of techniques for the analysis of urban energy systems.

Courses

2023–2025 Integrated Design Project of the MIBS at ETH Zurich

The Integrated Design Project (IDP) is the studio of the Master in Integrated Building Systems (MIBS) at ETH Zurich. Students work in pairs, use the City Energy Analyst alongside their usual design tools, and spend a semester on a real site — three editions, three sites, across Zurich and Shanghai.

In 2023, the site was Altstetten, a transforming district in the west of Zurich. Each group took an 800 m radius and asked how to futureproof an existing European neighbourhood for the climate of 2050, working through the base case, energy demand, solar potential, and urban development with retrofit, before zooming into a 200 m cluster along an individual track such as urban BIPV, microclimate, lifecycle and materials, or urban energy optimisation.

In 2024, the studio moved to Shanghai and the western part of the former Expo site, with ECADI as local partner. Eighteen students designed a net-zero city quarter from scratch, running base-case simulations in current and 2050 climates and tracing operational and embodied carbon to 2100.

In 2025, the site was Fuxing Island, a former industrial island in Shanghai’s Yangpu District, framed as an energy-driven urban regeneration for a future science city. For the first time the studio ran jointly with the Master of Architecture programme at Tongji University — 19 MIBS and 9 Tongji students, a joint kickoff workshop in Shanghai, and shared mid-term and final reviews. After the mid-term, students were required to run two to three full design iterations, each starting from the previous round of simulation results, which is what finally brought the design and engineering sides into the same conversation.

Across all three years, students moved between the single building (archetype, retrofit, facade) and the district (heating network, PV strategy, density) — the IDP is built around keeping both scales visible at the same time. CEA made a real difference to how the studio runs: learning it is not effortless, but it is approachable enough that urban designers can build a decent UBEM model within one or two weeks.

Read the full studio write-up at ETH Zurich

2022 M.Arch. Senior research design studio at the University of Calgary

In the final design studio of the M.Arch. program at the University of Calgary, students worked on the topic of urban design and on-site solar energy use. The City Energy Analyst was taught as the energy simulation working tool.

This course represented the University of Calgary at the Academic Summit on Architecture 2022 by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.

2018 Executive course on Urban Energy Systems Analysis at FCL

The executive course provided an introduction to urban energy systems analysis theory and practice with the City Energy Analyst (CEA). In hands-on exercises, the participant learnt how to use advanced numerical methods to estimate and optimize the performance of real urban energy systems. The participants examined the techno-economic potential of strategies ranging from building retrofits, renewable energy integration, and district energy.

2016 Workshop on the City Energy Analyst at SBE

Participants were invited to take part in the first public CEA workshop as part of the 2016 Sustainable Built Environment (SBE) conference held at ETH Zurich. The two-day session consisted of theoretical input, as well as individual and group work. The participants came from a wide range of backgrounds from design-based disciplines to engineering, and ranging in position from PhD student to assistant professor. The main objectives of the workshop were to present the tool to a diverse audience and check its role in creating synergies between various scenarios in an urban context. The workshop also aimed to assess the user friendliness of the tool as well as its importance in the field.

While the theoretical content of the workshop was generally considered adequate, a large number of participants expressed interest in a longer workshop including a detailed analysis of the calculation methods. Regarding the tool itself, a majority of the participants rated the tool’s user-friendliness and their likelihood to use the tool again positively.

2016 Integrated design studio at ETH Zurich

The City of Zurich is looking for a vision of an extended campus in the city center. Urban planners worked on designing this area for about a decade. In 2014, the so called Vertiefungsstudie, a study on possible core design proposals, was published. The site contains three main actors: The University Hospital (USZ), the University of Zurich (UZH) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) along with other, mainly residential-use buildings.

Students of the Master in Integrated Building Systems (MIBS) were asked to first analyse the status quo in terms of energy supply and emission systems, building typologies, geometry and age, local renewables as well as local climate and context. This allowed students to get a comprehensive overview of the study area, its problems, constraints and potentials. Following this analysis, each group got to choose a site – either a brownfield (here, students will have to design a new building) or a site that is already occupied by a building (in this case a retrofit concept is to be developed). Finally, students were asked to design a building on the selected site and assess its performance, incorporating the previously developed energy analysis. Throughout the whole process, students looped back to evaluate their proposals, rendering a continuous relationship between designing on the urban and building scales.

The main goal of this course was to develop synergies and designs that focus on enhancing the energy performance, reducing CO2 emissions and fostering sustainability of a city quarter.