Session

How Digital Twins Enable City-Wide Electrification

Digital twin technologies are helping the City of Ithaca identify impactful strategies for electrifying its building stock.

Ithaca’s ambitious electrification plan, one of the most extensive in the U.S., aims to significantly reduce building-related carbon emissions and achieve city-wide carbon neutrality by 2030.

With limited resources, the city is working with researchers from Cornell University’s Environmental Systems Lab and RMI, leveraging a socioeconomic urban energy model to assess the cost and benefits of different retrofit measures across 5,468 buildings.

This session will highlight lessons for other cities aiming for broad-scale electrification and how stakeholders can use digital twin models as a common ground for discussion. Key insights include identifying which retrofit strategies maximize cost effectiveness and selecting metrics that prioritize buildings for targeted emissions reductions.