Methodology for integrated modelling and impact assessment of city energy system scenarios

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

27 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Cities are ought to play a key role in the energy transition to a low carbon society as they concentrate more than half of the world's population and are responsible for about 67% primary energy consumption and around 70% of the energy-related CO2 emissions. To achieve the agreed climate targets, efficient urban planning is a must. Tools and methods have risen to model different aspects of the energy performance of urban areas. Nevertheless, addressing the complexity of a city energy system is a great challenge and new integrated tools and methods are still needed. This paper presents a methodology for integrated city energy modelling and assessment, from the characterization of the city's current energy performance to the development and assessment of future scenarios. Energy characterization is based on the combination of bottom-up approaches with top-down data to establish the city's energy baseline. This baseline integrates bottom-up results from a GIS based model which is used to characterize the city's building stock energy performance, while available information on the vehicle stock is used to model the mobility sector. Scenarios are developed from this baseline and assessed through a multi-criteria impact assessment model. A simplified case study is carried out for the city of Valencia (Spain) to demonstrate the suggested methodology, and results are shown for three different scenarios: one focused on the building sector, one on transport, and one combining measures in both sectors. The transport-focused scenario demonstrates to be the most favourable in terms of energy savings and emissions reductions. The application of the proposed method is intended to support the development of strategies and plans for energy transition at city level. The main challenges for its application in cities are data availability at urban level, the uncertainty related to modelling the transport sector, and the unavailability of adapted I/O tables at city scale to assess socioeconomic impacts.
Original languageEnglish
Article number100553
Pages (from-to)100553
Number of pages1
JournalEnergy Strategy Reviews
Volume32
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Nov 2020

Keywords

  • City energy
  • Low carbon society

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Methodology for integrated modelling and impact assessment of city energy system scenarios'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this