Solar buildings as a decentralized renewable energy system have been an important attempt to reduce
carbon emissions. However, appropriate modeling systems are lack to answer both questions: how much
solar energy can be produced in an urban area and to what extent urban solar building systems are selfsustained
in terms of energy? Such lack is due to the limitation of current building energy modeling and
solar potential methods in accounting for the urban context influences and the data inconsistency. This
study tries to fill this gap by developing a GIS-based energy balance modeling system for urban solar
buildings. Different from previous modeling methods, this modeling system extends the system boundary
from a single building to the urban building system, uses urban-scale data instead of costly survey, adopts
widely used GIS-platform rather than a new standalone software, and makes reasonable trade-offs
between speed and accuracy instead of only focusing on accuracy.