Abstract
The growing share of global energy consumption by cities (currently over 65%) raises the requirements for a systematic holistic approach for designing urban energy infrastructure in order to ensure its sustainability. A literature review of state-of-the-art modeling of urban energy infrastructure design emphasized the incomprehensive sustainability of the performed evaluations, as they accounted for several aspects of sustainability but missed others. Omitting important aspects can have significant implications which can put the sustainability of the energy infrastructure at risk. In this study, we attempted to develop a comprehensive model for designing sustainable energy infrastructure for urban districts, which accounts for the four aspects of sustainability: social, technical, environmental, and economic. The model is based on a four-step methodology: district characterization, a technological survey for distributed generation and energy storage, selecting suitable technologies according to social and technical criteria, and simulations of different energy infrastructure configurations to find the most suitable configurations basing on economic and environmental criteria. The research includes a case study in which the model was implemented for the Technion campus in Haifa. The developed model proved to be a comprehensive, efficient, and versatile tool for designing urban energy infrastructure.
Highlights
Received: 7 November 2021Global urbanization makes cities the largest energy consumer of worldwide
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The sustainability evaluation in the methodology is divided into two steps, where the social and technical evaluations are included in the third step, and the economic and environmental evaluations are included in the fourth step
Summary
Global urbanization makes cities the largest energy consumer of worldwide. Cities produced about 70% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions [1]. These shares are projected to grow even larger, as the UN project 60% of the world population will live in cities by 2030 and 68% will live in cities by 2050 [2]. This makes urban energy infrastructure the main concern for the energy sector. The need for sustainable urban energy infrastructures has been emphasized in order to raise their ability to remain operational for long durations
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