When designing and managing integrated renewable
energy technologies at a community level, prediction
of hourly thermal demand is essential. Dynamic
thermal modelling, using deterministic occupancy
profiles, has been widely used to predict the highresolution
temporal thermal demand of individual
buildings. Only in recent years has this approach
started to be applied to simulate all buildings in a
neighbourhood or an entire housing stock of a region.
This study explores the potential of predicting hourly
thermal demand for a group of dwellings by applying
a stochastic occupancy model to dynamic thermal
modelling. A case study with 125 new houses
demonstrates the approach. The result was a more
realistic and representative hourly thermal demand
profile, compared to using standard deterministic
occupancy profiles