Urban Energy Efficiency Research Articles

System Dynamics Modeling of Lighting Electricity Demand in the Urban Residential Sector of Nepal

A significant portion of the total electricity is consumed in the residential sector of Nepal, mainly for lighting purpose. In this study, a model has been developed using the concept of system dynamics to analyze the dynamics of the changes in the urban residential lighting electricity demand up to the year 2030. A system dynamics modeling tool, Venism, has been used for this purpose. This study is useful for the utilities of companies for the power capacity expansion planning. Altogether three different scenarios have been developed. They are Reference Scenario (Ref), LED Lamp (LL) Scenario and Incandescent Lamp Remove (ILR) Scenario. The study has shown that lighting electricity consumption has already been in the decreasing trend due to the increasing use of Clear Fluorescent Lamp (CFL) and will be the minimum somewhere in the year between 2021 and 2022. Only a small portion of the total electricity will be consumed for lighting the household in the urban residential sector of Nepal in the coming decade. Therefore, government should focus the urban energy efficiency program for other uses of electricity such as cooking, water heating and water pumping etc. so that a significant amount of electricity can be saved in the urban households of Nepal. This study has also shown that there is no difference between the use of CFL and LED lamps from the energy saving point of view. Therefore, like the case of incandescent lamp and CFL, there is no need to encourage the people to buy LED lamp instead of CFL.The Journal of Development and Administrative Studies (JODAS)Vol. 23(1-2), pp. 33-54

Technology assessment of the two most relevant aspects for improving urban energy efficiency identified in six mid-sized European cities from case studies in Sweden

The increasing population living in cities is leading to higher resource utilization, which strains the cities’ ability to focus on sustainability. Adoption of different technologies can transform cities into “smart cities” that utilize energy in a more efficiently.This paper presents results from a technology assessment tool developed together with six mid-sized European cities. The main areas of focus have been evaluated based on the cities’ priorities: transportation (both public and private) and consumers’ perspectives on the use of smart electricity meters. The use of electric vehicles in Sweden, and a techno-economic evaluation of biogas-derived biomethane and electricity use in public transportation have been analyzed. The main conclusions show an overall higher efficiency for biogas-derived electricity use in electric buses; a need for higher consumer engagement through more detailed information provision for both increasing EV market penetration and electricity savings; and a need to establish detailed technology assessments for successful technology adoption in cities.

Towards Low-Carbon Urban Forms: A Comparative Study on Energy Efficiencies of Residential Neighborhoods in Chongming Eco-Island

The hyper-fast urbanization process in China has led to the mixes of traditional and contemporary neighborhoods, especially in the aspects of residential districts. The aim of this paper is to explore the interrelationship between urban form and energy efficiency of the residential neighborhoods on Chongming Eco-Island, which is a leading example in China's urbanization towards low-carbon and sustainability. By the empirical study and simulation on six most dominant neighborhood typologies, it is found that the annual building energy consumption of them vary significantly largely due to the various occupant behaviors. Moreover, the calculation of solar potential and energy trade-offs between production and consumption indicates that the nucleated villages and slab buildings have the greatest retrofitting potentials, which lead to the policy implications for Chongming’ s low energy and low carbon urban management.

China's urban residential carbon emission and energy efficiency policy

With China's urbanization, issues relating to emission reduction of buildings have become more prominent. Based on the latest data, we estimate total area of China's buildings, total housing area, and residential elevator stock. And also, we estimate energy consumption and carbon emission from the fossil fuel during building operation phase. Two index decomposition analysis on changes of urban residential carbon emissions and emissions intensity have been applied. The major findings of the study are: firstly, there has been a significant shift from primary energy consumption to electricity and heat in urban residential during the periods of 1996–2012, and the proportion of direct CO2 emission to residential emission declined. Secondly, residential energy intensity, per capita housing area, total number of households are the main driving factors affecting the change in carbon emissions, with contribution rates of −39%, 77%, 67% respectively, and the decline of energy intensity is the most important factor of decreasing carbon intensity (contribution rate of 89%). Thirdly, reduction of carbon intensity is conducive to the decline of CO2 and decrease in emission intensity of urban residential. Residential energy efficiency policy lessons learned from rethink of economic and social policies during the study period were concluded finally.

Scaling indicator and planning plane: An indicator and a visual tool for exploring the relationship between urban form, energy efficiency and carbon emissions

Ecosystems and other naturally resilient systems exhibit allometric scaling in the distribution of sizes of their elements. In this paper we define an allometry inspired scaling indicator for cities that is a first step toward quantifying the stability borne of a complex systems’ hierarchical structural composition. The scaling indicator is calculated using large census datasets and is analogous to fractal dimension in spatial analysis. Lack of numerical rigor and the resulting variation in scaling indicators – inherent in the use of box counting mechanism for fractal dimension calculation for cities – has been one of the hindrances in the adoption of fractal dimension as an urban indicator of note. The intra-urban indicator of scaling in population density distribution developed here is calculated for 58 US cities using a methodology that produces replicable results, employing large census-block wise population datasets from the 2010 US Census and the 2007 US Economic Census. We show that rising disparity – as measured by the proposed indicator of population density distribution in census blocks in Metropolitan Statistical Areas adversely affects energy consumption efficiency and carbon emissions in cities and leads to a higher urban carbon footprint. We then define a planning plane as a visual and analytic tool for incorporation of scaling indicator analysis into policy and decision-making.

The economics of green transition strategies for cities: Can low carbon, energy efficient development approaches be adapted to demand side urban water efficiency?

Cities are major contributors to global emissions, producers of waste and consumers of resources such as energy, water and food: implementing green development strategies is hence a core challenge of modern city-planning. The attention of research has been focusing on the development of energy efficient, low carbon strategies, yet city decision-makers need truly integrated approaches, as the one proposed by the water-energy-food Nexus. The purpose of our paper is to investigate whether it is possible to take one step in this direction by extending existing approaches to energy efficiency strategies to progressively include other priority resources, in particular water. To test this hypothesis we have taken a robust and well accepted methodology, the ELCC (Economics of Low Carbon development strategies for Cities) developed by SEI and CCCEP, and we have extended it to the case of demand side water efficiency strategies for cities. We have then applied the adapted ELCC framework to the case study of the domestic sector of the city of Bologna (Italy), identifying and prioritizing several efficiency measures. Measures were evaluated through their capital investment, annual values of savings, payback period and reduction in consumption, and then aggregated in different scenarios in order to highlight potential urban investments and to showcase a possible approach to the prioritization of demand side water efficiency measures. The results show that, with an upfront investment of € 17 million, a feasible subset of Bologna’s households could be equipped with five selected cost-effective measures, generating annual savings of € 10.2 million and reducing the total domestic water consumption of 34% by 2020 compared to the 2012 initial value. With additional € 28.5 million, households could be equipped with more costly appliances reaching an overall water reduction of 37% by 2020. Our findings confirm that it is possible to successfully extend current approaches to urban energy efficiency strategies to include demand side water efficiency, adding an important building block to the construction of an integrated Nexus-based approach to green development strategies at the city-level. We encourage further tests to confirm the robustness of the methodology.

Electrolytic Hydrogen Production From Renewable Source, Storage and Reconversion in Fuel Cells: The System of the “Mediterranea” University of Reggio Calabria

Nowadays a redesign of cities, amid the others from an energetic point of view, is taking place. It increasingly addresses the smart city model, an organic system in which infrastructures, services and technology are organized in order to achieve friendly and livable cities, combining in a single urban model environment protection, energy efficiency and economic sustainability.In smart cities buildings are nZEB and equipped with domotics applications, energy grids are smart, transports are electric, lighting is high-efficiency, hydrogen is used for energy storage, ecc. As concerns this latter, in the last periods hydrogen has increasingly shown to be particularly fit as an energetic carrier, being not pollutant, versatile, allowing production at all scales and, compared to electric battery, not requiring time consuming recharging. Anyway, due to the present relevant starting funds of its technology, its quick, effective penetration into the market still requires the necessary economic breakthroughs.Within this frame, in the paper a system aimed at hydrogen production through electrolysis from renewable source (provided by both PV and wind generators), its storage and reconversion in fuel cells is presented. The system is installed at the Mediterranea University of Reggio Calabria. Particularly, in the paper the global process taking place in the system is described, evaluating the hourly hydrogen stored amount, the power autonomy provided and the global efficiency of the process.

The Circumvention of Barriers to Urban Rail Energy Efficiency

As energy prices rise, urban rail energy efficiency becomes even more important. Many technological, operational and policy-based energy efficiency measures are well known and can have a notable positive effect on the urban rail systems. However, these measures can remain unimplemented. This lack of action can often be attributed to a variety of conflicting stakeholder opinions and a lack of knowledge transfer. This paper firstly focusses on the energy efficiency requirements of various stakeholders, before discussing about how such conflicts can be circumvented to ensure the success of future energy efficiency projects.

Building Productive Links between the UNFCCC and the Broader Global Climate Governance Landscape1. This article reflects and builds upon discussions at a December 2013 workshop held in Neemrana, India, sponsored by the Centre for Policy Research (New Delhi) and the Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios (MAPS) program of the Energy Research Centre (Cape Town). This article builds on pp. 14–19

This forum article outlines a research agenda focused on linkages between the UNFCCC and other governance arrangements that also address climate change. We take as our point of departure the recognition that the UNFCCC is no longer the sole site of global climate change governance, and thus the types of linkage across what we call the global climate governance landscape including as a central node the UNFCCC are important for thinking through how improved global responses to climate change may be pursued. The forum identifies two specific types of linkage: division-of-labor linkages and catalytic linkages. We illustrate these with some examples and raise questions we believe would be useful to pursue in future research.

Update on IBE and 2014 papers of the year

I begin this editorial by referring you to the editorial of 19(2), 2010, ‘A gate keeper of knowledge transfer’. I have now served the readers and SAGE as the editor of the journal for over six years. I was appointed as the editor in February 2009 and officially, in April 2009. I believe the journal has advanced in all aspects since I have become the editor. The journal has become more popular; the submission rate, the download rate of papers and the impact factor of the journal have all been improved. The journal is now widely accepted by most of our readers as one of the leading journals on indoor environmental quality, environmental/architectural engineering and sustainable built environment. We should all rejoice by the fact that there is now a journal of internationally recognized quality with a rapid improvement on the impact value in academic research, national and international standard developments and guidelines for design/planning applications. As I have explained in the editorial of 23(4), 2014 that the rapid rise in our impact value can be explained by the high level of global concern in the sustainable development of built environments, on social, pollution and environmental health issues in relation to urban developments, ageing communities, energy efficiency and resource management. I believe our published papers are serving this research demand pertaining to the quality of future sustainable built environments and well-being of our communities. We have established our niche area in publishing original research papers on the performance and functioning of various forms of built environments leading to developments of standards and guidelines relating to environmental quality in buildings and urban environments. However, the rapid rise in popularity of our journal has generated a surge in citation of our journal papers especially by other authors of the same journal (i.e. self-citations). This led to our suspension in the 2012 JCR (Journal Citation Report) published by Thomson Reuters. The published papers in our journal before I became the editor and during my first two years as the editor really did not receive many citations whether from internal or external sources. As the journal has been attracting loyalty and interest from authors worldwide, especially from the Far East, and also due to our unique niche subject areas, therefore our published papers are naturally attracting citations from authors who use the journal, especially from the special issue papers. I have checked and compared our journal with other journals of similar subject areas and found that the number of so-called self-citations in our journal is really less than the other comparable journals but because Indoor and Built Environment has a comparatively smaller volume, the ‘self-citation’ rate was higher. Therefore, the rapid rise in popularity of the journal has a higher impact on the ‘self-citation’ rate.

Supporting Urban Energy Efficiency with Volunteered Roof Information and the Google Maps API

The Heat Energy Assessment Technologies (HEAT) project uses high-resolution airborne thermal imagery, Geographic Object-Based Image Analysis (GEOBIA), and a Geoweb environment to allow the residents of Calgary, Alberta, Canada to visualize the amount and location of waste heat leaving their houses, communities, and the city. To ensure the accuracy of these measures, the correct emissivity of roof materials needs to be known. However, roof material information is not readily available in the Canadian public domain. To overcome this challenge, a unique Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) application was developed using Google Street View that engages citizens to classify the roof materials of single dwelling residences in a simple and intuitive manner. Since data credibility, quality, and accuracy are major concerns when using VGI, a private Multiple Listing Services (MLS) dataset was used for cross-verification. From May–November 2013, 1244 volunteers from 85 cities and 14 countries classified 1815 roofs in the study area. Results show (I) a 72% match between the VGI and MLS data; and (II) in the majority of cases, roofs with greater than, or equal to five contributions have the same material defined in both datasets. Additionally, this research meets new challenges to the GEOBIA community to incorporate existing GIS vector data within an object-based workflow and engages the public to provide volunteered information for urban objects from which new geo-intelligence is created in support of urban energy efficiency.

Heat Roadmap Europe: Identifying strategic heat synergy regions

This study presents a methodology to assess annual excess heat volumes from fuel combustion activities in energy and industry sector facilities based on carbon dioxide emission data. The aim is to determine regional balances of excess heat relative heat demands for all third level administrative regions in the European Union (EU) and to identify strategic regions suitable for large-scale implementation of district heating. The approach is motivated since the efficiency of current supply structures to meet building heat demands, mainly characterised by direct use of primary energy sources, is low and improvable. District heating is conceived as an urban supply side energy efficiency measure employable to enhance energy system efficiency by increased excess heat recoveries; hereby reducing primary energy demands by fuel substitution. However, the importance of heat has long been underestimated in EU decarbonisation strategies and local heat synergies have often been overlooked in energy models used for such scenarios. Study results indicate that 46% of all excess heat in EU27, corresponding to 31% of total building heat demands, is located within identified strategic regions. Still, a realisation of these rich opportunities will require higher recognition of the heat sector in future EU energy policy.

The Factors Influencing Transport Energy Consumption in Urban Areas: a Review

Transport energy consumption accounts for about one third of total energy consumption in EU. Despite significant advances in transport technology and fuel formulation, transport energy consumption has increased in most EU countries over the last three decades. This increase in consumption occurred as a result of factors such as higher car ownership, a growth in automobile use and an increase in vehicle distances traveled. As travel and land-use are a function of one another, it is often hypothesized that changing urban structure can result in changes in energy consumption. Understanding how different land use characteristics may influence travel behaviour and the corresponding energy consumption is crucial for planners and policy makers in order to develop strategic actions to shrink the environmental footprint of the urban transportation sector. The aim of this article is to review the current literature on the connections between land use, travel behavior and energy consumption. In particular, this paper seeks to identify the determinants of transport energy consumption in urban areas by reviewing evidence from empirical studies. To this aim, nine characteristics of land use are presented and their effects on both travel behaviour and energy use are discussed Our review shown that, in contrast to the focus on the effect of the built environment on travel, only few researchers have empirically investigated the linkage between the built environment and transportation energy use. The research described in this paper has been developed within the PON 04a2_E Smart Energy Master project. It represents part of a much broader research project aimed at the development of an integrated model of urban energy efficiency.

Understanding the Climate Mitigation Benefits of Product Systems: Comment on “Using Attributional Life Cycle Assessment to Estimate Climate‐Change Mitigation…”

Understanding the Climate Mitigation Benefits of Product Systems: Comment on “Using Attributional Life Cycle Assessment to Estimate Climate‐Change Mitigation…”

Forecasting energy consumption of multi-family residential buildings using support vector regression: Investigating the impact of temporal and spatial monitoring granularity on performance accuracy

Buildings are the dominant source of energy consumption and environmental emissions in urban areas. Therefore, the ability to forecast and characterize building energy consumption is vital to implementing urban energy management and efficiency initiatives required to curb emissions. Advances in smart metering technology have enabled researchers to develop “sensor based” approaches to forecast building energy consumption that necessitate less input data than traditional methods. Sensor-based forecasting utilizes machine learning techniques to infer the complex relationships between consumption and influencing variables (e.g., weather, time of day, previous consumption). While sensor-based forecasting has been studied extensively for commercial buildings, there is a paucity of research applying this data-driven approach to the multi-family residential sector. In this paper, we build a sensor-based forecasting model using Support Vector Regression (SVR), a commonly used machine learning technique, and apply it to an empirical data-set from a multi-family residential building in New York City. We expand our study to examine the impact of temporal (i.e., daily, hourly, 10min intervals) and spatial (i.e., whole building, by floor, by unit) granularity have on the predictive power of our single-step model. Results indicate that sensor based forecasting models can be extended to multi-family residential buildings and that the optimal monitoring granularity occurs at the by floor level in hourly intervals. In addition to implications for the development of residential energy forecasting models, our results have practical significance for the deployment and installation of advanced smart metering devices. Ultimately, accurate and cost effective wide-scale energy prediction is a vital step towards next-generation energy efficiency initiatives, which will require not only consideration of the methods, but the scales for which data can be distilled into meaningful information.

Node: Methodology for Energy Balance for a Transportation Hub and its Neighbourhood

The “NODE” research project, led by EIFER, addresses the question of how to improve energy efficiency in transport hubs. It aims to bring together different stakeholders, such as urban planners, transport planners and energy providers, each with a distinct point of view and area of expertise, to generate knowledge about energy governance. The objective is to evaluate the way that energy issues are addressed in planning urban projects near public transport hubs. It will estimate possible changes to the “use of public transport”, “built environment” “activity developed” and “demographic profile”, which influence the neighbourhood's energy consumption. The following article describes the method used and the modules “transport” and “land use”, and then looks at them in respect of urban energy efficiency. Some intermediate results will be presented but it should be noted that the model, especially the module addressing land use, is still in development.

Benchmarking urban energy efficiency in the UK

This study asks what is the ‘best’ way to measure urban energy efficiency. There has been recent interest in identifying efficient cities so that best practices can be shared, a process known as benchmarking. Previous studies have used relatively simple metrics that provide limited insight on the complexity of urban energy efficiency and arguably fail to provide a ‘fair’ measure of urban performance. Using a data set of 198 urban UK local administrative units, three methods are compared: ratio measures, regression residuals, and data envelopment analysis. The results show that each method has its own strengths and weaknesses regarding the ease of interpretation, ability to identify outliers and provide consistent rankings. Efficient areas are diverse but are notably found in low income areas of large conurbations such as London, whereas industrial areas are consistently ranked as inefficient. The results highlight the shortcomings of the underlying production-based energy accounts. Ideally urban energy efficiency benchmarks would be built on consumption-based accounts, but interim recommendations are made regarding the use of efficiency measures that improve upon current practice and facilitate wider conversations about what it means for a specific city to be energy-efficient within an interconnected economy.

Design for Urban Rail Transit Energy Efficiency Management System

With the rapid development of Chinese economy and the speeding up urbanization, urban rail transit has entered a rapid development period, which results in more and more energy consumption. Meanwhile affected by energy source and environment factors, the state has implemented energy-saving emission reduction strategies in various fields, so energy efficient management for urban rail transit becomes more important. Based on the analysis of energy consumption problems in urban rail transit, the paper designs urban rail transit energy efficiency management system from the aspects of overall architecture, service architecture and application function, and provides technical support for the realization of the software system.

Developing HEAT Scores with H-Res Thermal Imagery to Support Urban Energy Efficiency

Developing HEAT Scores with H-Res Thermal Imagery to Support Urban Energy Efficiency

Assessment of selected energy efficiency and renewable energy investments in the Mediterranean Partner Countries

This article presents an assessment of selected energy efficiency (EE) and renewable energy (RE) investments planned by nine Mediterranean Partner Countries (MPCs) over 2011–2020. The investments looked at focus on: (1) urban energy efficiency and small-scale renewables (“demand-side”), and (2) large-scale renewable power generation (“supply-side”). The article also discusses the implications of deploying such projects in terms of potential energy saved or produced and economic impacts. The main findings of this article are: (1) the MPCs need to identify more EE and RE investments and accelerate the development process of the identified ones in order to fulfil their national targets; (2) the full deployment of EE and RE investments identified towards the achievement of the envisaged 2020 targets require significant investment costs and some subsidies; (3) significant (mostly) financial and organizational barriers still hinder the implementation of the examined EE and RE investments. Insights generated by this article can be useful regional messages for energy policy leaders in the MPCs to accelerate the development of the selected EE and RE investments.