Advanced urban heat mitigation technologies that involve the use of super cool materials combined with properly designed green infrastructure, lower the urban ambient and land surface temperatures and reduce the cooling consumption at the city scale. We present the results of the world’s largest heat mitigation project in Riyadh, KSA. Daytime radiative coolers as well as cool materials combined with irrigated or non-irrigated greenery, have been used to design eight holistic heat mitigation scenarios. We assessed the climatic impact of the scenarios as well as the corresponding energy benefits of 3,323 urban buildings. An impressive decrease of the peak ambient temperature, up to 4.5°C, is calculated, consisting of the highest reported urban ambient temperature reduction, while the annual sum of the differences of the ambient temperature against a standard temperature base, (cooling degree hours), in the city decrease by up to 26%. We found that innovative urban heat mitigation strategies contribute to remarkable cooling energy conservation by up to 16%, while the combined implementation of heat mitigation and energy adaptation technologies decreases the cooling demand by up to 35%. It is the first article investigating the large-scale energy benefits of modern heat mitigation technologies when they are implemented in cities. 

Data was generated by CityBES for each building.