Abstract
As cities develop new interventions for climate change mitigation, incorporating renewable energy in urban public spaces becomes a common norm to address sustainability objectives. However, current built projects and assessment practices mainly uses a “techno-fixes” approach focusing on strategies that are related to the environmental benefits and neglecting other potential strategies instigating social and economic benefits of renewable energy. The purpose of this study is to present a potential sustainability assessment model introducing new strategies for public space renewable energy use where social and economic benefits of renewables become evident. Supplemented with theories and principles from ecology, the model’s economic strategies refer whether the project considers meaningful part of the produced electricity for generating a local economy; environmental strategy comprises embodied energy, energy storage and self-maintenance; social strategy includes whether the project considers generating active and passive interaction using on-site electricity. Ballast Point Park in Sydney was used as a test bed to examine the model and sustainability of park’s renewable energy use. The findings showed that environmental strategies were evident in the park, social strategies remained average and economic strategies with renewable energy were lacking. Interactions with on-site produced electricity was further claimed to be an imperative feature of any public space. Recommendations were made specific to operational and planning impacts of the integrated model.
Highlights
Energy autonomy is an emerging trend at city, neighborhood, community and building scales.Renewable energy, distributed generation, transition from alternative circuit to direct circuit infrastructure and resilient micro and smart grids, all indicate a transition to new energy environments [1]
Ballast Point Park (BPP) was chosen as a case study because the park was recognized and awarded by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture (AILA)
Since wind was the primary renewable source in the project, wind intensity was measured using an anemometer from seven observations zones to understand if turbine locations associated with the Copious amount of sustainability assessment tools are used for different human environments, site wind potentials [14]
Summary
Energy autonomy is an emerging trend at city, neighborhood, community and building scales. Renewable energy, distributed generation, transition from alternative circuit to direct circuit infrastructure and resilient micro and smart grids, all indicate a transition to new energy environments [1]. Using renewable energy in built environment becomes a common solution for climate change mitigation. Its current use into urban environments is problematic from a sustainability perspective. Most built interventions concentrate on improving cities’ environmental sustainability by retrofitting urban environments with technological additions such as green walls and photovoltaic panels [2]. Rather than perceiving renewable energy applications as crude technological addition that address the environmental sustainability objective of a sustainable top-down developmental approach, scholars and practitioners need to treat renewable energy as “ecological infrastructures”
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