Improving Spatial Allocation for Energy System Coupling with Graph Neural Networks

In energy system analysis, coupling models with mismatched spatial resolutions is a significant challenge. A common solution is assigning weights to high-resolution geographic units for aggregation, but traditional models are limited by using only a single geospatial attribute. This paper presents an innovative method employing a self-supervised Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network to address this issue. This method models high-resolution geographic units as graph nodes, integrating various geographical features to generate physically meaningful weights for each grid point. These weights enhance the conventional Voronoi-based allocation method, allowing it to go beyond simply geographic proximity by incorporating essential geographic information.In addition, the self-supervised learning paradigm overcomes the lack of accurate ground-truth data. Experimental results demonstrate that applying weights generated by this method to cluster-based Voronoi Diagrams significantly enhances scalability, accuracy, and physical plausibility, while increasing precision compared to traditional methods.

HeatPrompt: Zero-Shot Vision-Language Modeling of Urban Heat Demand from Satellite Images

Accurate heat-demand maps play a crucial role in decarbonizing space heating, yet most municipalities lack detailed building-level data needed to calculate them. We introduce HeatPrompt, a zero-shot vision-language energy modeling framework that estimates annual heat demand using semantic features extracted from satellite images, basic Geographic Information System (GIS), and building-level features. We feed pretrained Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) with a domain-specific prompt to act as an energy planner and extract the visual attributes such as roof age, building density, etc, from the RGB satellite image that correspond to the thermal load. A Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) regressor trained on these captions shows an $R^2$ uplift of 93.7% and shrinks the mean absolute error (MAE) by 30% compared to the baseline model. Qualitative analysis shows that high-impact tokens align with high-demand zones, offering lightweight support for heat planning in data-scarce regions.