Urban Energy Governance Research Articles

Blockchain for urban governance: Enhancing trust in smart city systems with advanced techniques

The rapid urbanization and increasing energy demands necessitate innovative solutions for efficient energy governance in smart cities from the social science perspective. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for Urban Energy Governance (UEG), focusing on the collaboration of three urban systems in energy exchange considering social and environmental impacts. To address the challenges of security, energy forecasting, and nonlinear optimization, we employ advanced techniques, including blockchain technology, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks for accurate energy forecasting, and a modified Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm for solving the proposed nonlinear optimization problem. The utilization of blockchain enhances the security and transparency of energy transactions, fostering trust among stakeholders. Additionally, LSTM models leverage historical data to provide precise energy forecasts, optimizing resource utilization. The modified PSO algorithm tailors optimization to the specific nonlinearities of the proposed problem, ensuring efficient and effective decision-making in the context of Urban Energy Governance. Through a multi-faceted approach, our framework contributes to the advancement of smart city systems, providing a secure, forecast-driven, and optimized energy governance model for sustainable urban development.

Energy Poverty and the Proliferation of Heterogeneous Infrastructure Configurations in Accra: Implications for Urban Energy Governance in African Cities

Energy Poverty and the Proliferation of Heterogeneous Infrastructure Configurations in Accra: Implications for Urban Energy Governance in African Cities

Too big to succeed? Institutional inertia in low-carbon district heating experiment

The energy transitions are in an acceleration phase, where less carbon intensive technologies emerge, but their applicability is uncertain creating a need for real-life experimentation. Cities have become a focal context, where novel constellations of technologies and practices are introduced to reconfigure patterns of production and consumption. One area of urban energy governance gaining increasing attention especially in a Northern context is the low carbon transition in district heating systems that provide the majority of heating in the residential sector and has been primarily built around combustion technologies relying on fossil energy reserves. This article analyses a bidirectional low heat experiment in district heat in Finland by examining what are the dimensions of institutional inertia and how it impacts the reconfiguration of an urban energy system. Institutional inertia emerges from the technical innovation itself, land-use planning practices, the absence of formal regulations and via organisational inertia in the implementation of the experiment. We find that visions about the innovation can become constraints of the experiment, which limit learning and reshaping of innovation, thus preventing radical transformation of the district heating system and watering down the initial target of the experiment. We contribute to the conceptualisation of institutional inertia within the energy transition.

Urban governance dispositifs: cohering diverse ecologies of urban energy governance

As cities confront increasingly complex governance problems, conceptions of urban governance are becoming progressively more receptive to grasping its dynamic and multiplex nature, its connection to multiple lines of authority and forms of power, and the socio-material assemblages through which it works. Yet, despite conceptual advances around the dynamism and heterogeneity of urban governing assemblages and their durability, much remains to be understood about the processes and devices that compose and cohere their constituent elements to generate governance capacity. We explore this limitation by deploying Foucault’s concept of ‘dispositif’ to analytically characterize how urban governance capacity is achieved around complex urban problems via processes and devices of composition and cohering. We do so by examining an emergent urban energy governance dispositif focused around top-tier commercial office space in Sydney, Australia: a key site around which multiple elements have been composed in a complex, entangled dispositif to produce effective urban governance capacity and accomplish substantive gains in office building energy performance. We characterise the socio-material elements involved and, more particularly, identify and analyse the processes and devices that compose the dispositif and cohere its governance capacity and we draw out the diverse forms of power that are immanent in these processes. These are, we argue, key steps in refining systematic understandings of the contemporary functioning and politics of the distributed urban governance of complex urban challenges. We conclude with key observations suggested by our analysis for urban governance scholarship.

Mobilizing smart grid experiments: Policy mobilities and urban energy governance

Cities across the US have been looking to urban experiments as a way to demonstrate potential pathways for carbon control, economic development, and resilience. On their own, these experiments are often small in scale and highly localized, embodying a piecemeal approach to urban development and climate governance. In this paper, I examine the relationship between urban experimentation and policy mobilities to understand how these projects have broader significance for climate governance and urban development. Drawing together empirical data from a multisited case study of smart grid experiments in Austin, Texas; Boulder, Colorado; and Chicago, Illinois, I show how governmental rationalities are mobilized, mutated, and transmitted in the processes of urban learning, extrospection, and consultation. While the imperative of cities to respond to climate change is ever more central to urban politics and governance, I find that the logics of experimentation are tied to specific governmental rationalities and norms of conduct that embed limited notions of citizen involvement and engagement in policy. The paper outlines how three elements of an Austin smart grid model—users as test-bed, test-bed as platform, and test-bed as epistemology—reinforce these logics and rationalities. The implications for urban climate and energy governance are outlined stressing three synergies between urban experiments and policy mobilities approaches.

Learning urban energy governance for system innovation: an assessment of transformative capacity development in three South Korean cities

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the preconditions and social learning processes that allow urban climate governance innovations and the solutions they engender to be transformative. It does so by assessing the capacity available to prepare for, initiate and steer a path-deviant sustainability transformation of the urban energy systems in three cities in South Korea – a country facing major challenges in this regard due to a heavy dependence on imported fossil energy resources and centralized institutions. The findings illustrate how synergies between local leadership, empowered communities of practice and trusted intermediation stand out as key drivers for learning transformative governance, in particular if linked to open experimentation, while also shaping the role of international exchange in this. In turn, national policy tends to constrain transformative capacity development and favor incremental modifications. Across all cities studied, major gaps still remain in terms of developing social learning processes that involve systems thinking, sustainability foresight, as well as suitable approaches for embedding more radical innovations. In conclusion, transformative capacity provides a useful lens to understand the potentials and limits of emerging urban governance innovations for unlearning dominant paradigms, and for triggering systemic change that enables more sustainable urban futures.

Towards new configurations of urban energy governance in South Africa’s Renewable Energy Procurement Programme

The South African Department of Energy launched the Renewable Energy Independent Power Producers Procurement Program (REIPPPP) in 2011 to secure additional renewable energy generation capacity for South Africa’s national electricity grid. The procurement framework included expenditure targets to drive socio-economic (SED) and enterprise development (ED) in local communities, together with requirements related to job creation through local employment as well as local community shareholding [2]. The article explores the opportunities opened up for alternative configurations of urban energy governance given the emergence of new dispersed and decentralised socio-technical infrastructure and the accompanying place-based investments by Independent Power Producers (IPPs). What follows is first an analysis of the relationship between the spatial realities of energy transitions and the political dynamics of the urban. Thereafter the article presents an exploration of the developmental implications of the programme together with three scenarios which might contribute towards enhancing the development outcomes of the REIPPPP, integrating IPPs into local economies or building sustainable energy democracies. In this way, we try to demonstrate how the expansion of utility scale renewable energy infrastructure might catalyse the emergence of new ‘spatial imaginaries’ [12] and the possibility of building ‘new forms of collective life’ [13] in South Africa.

The End-use Electric Energy Consumption in Urban Areas: A GIS-based methodology. An application in the city of Naples.

This work is part of the scientific research sector concerning the Government of Urban and Territorial Transformations in order to promote efficiency and reduction of energy consumption in urban areas. The contribution proposes a further deepening of the research work already carried out under the project Pon Smart Energy Master by the research group of the Laboratory of Territory, Mobility and Environmental (TeMA Lab) of Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, University of Naples Federico II. The aim is to assist public authorities, that also deal with the Urban Energy Governance, in determining the quantitative distribution of domestic and non-domestic electric energy consumption. Toward this goal, we use the Big Data, the Open Data and the Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques. In particular, this work developed a innovative GIS-based methodology that allows the knowledge, classification and representation of real electric energy consumption at micro scale for the domestic and non-domestic. Also, we validate the GIS-based methodology by an application at the city of Naples. We used the electric energy consumption data of year 2011 were given by Municipality Authority and Italian Revenue Agency. This will allow the identification of the electric energy problems present in the area of analysis in order to plan any intervention strategies. This contribution is divided into three main parts. In the first part, an analysis of the scientific literature is proposed on the theme of the Government of urban and territorial transformations and opportunities arising by Big Data, Open Data and GIS in the reduction of electric energy consumption. The second part explains the theoretical and technical phases that led to the development of the GIS-based methodology. In the last part, the application of the GIS-based methodology at the City of Naples is described.

Governing the transition to natural gas in Mediteranean Metropolis: The case of Cairo, Istanbul and Sfax (Tunisia)

Recent scholarship on urban energy governance has focused on low carbon energy strategies seen as a response to climate change and energy pressure threats. But such approaches tend to overlook the situations of cities from the Global South and emerging countries concerned with strong energy demand growth. The development of urban natural gas networks is an understudied response to such a challenge. Focusing on three cities, Istanbul, Cairo and Sfax (Tunisia), the article analyses the factors and the governance of these energy transitions. It uses a geographical approach to such processes that highlight the mutual influence of the territory in its material and political dimensions and of the policy goals and tools in the implementation. The development of urban gas networks rests upon the proximity of gas deposits. It is determined by metropolitan strategies for economic development as well as by programs aiming to cut energy subsidies. Though urban gas networks have a strong potential for restructuring the physical and social landscapes in cities, the dominant commercial approach taken by energy utilities and morphological constraints in the urban fabric limit their universalization. Natural gas is part of a mix of energies at the urban level and often competes with other energy forms, specifically renewables (like solar water heaters). Lastly, the development of urban natural gas networks sparks heated politics in relation to unfulfilled energy demand and affordability.

An experiment for urban energy autonomy in Seoul: The One ‘Less’ Nuclear Power Plant policy

This study examines an experiment in energy self-sufficiency in Seoul, Republic of Korea, through a particular energy policy called the One Less Nuclear Power Plant (OLNPP) policy. We define an urban energy experiment as a purposive intervention for energy transition from an energy system based on nuclear and fossil fuels to one based on renewable energy and energy demand management. We suggest three findings. First, we find that the themes of our theoretical framework policy backgrounds, governance and policy contents have played important roles for Seoul’s energy experiments aimed at urban energy autonomy. In particular, political leadership based on the mayor’s previous experiences contributed significantly to the formation and implementation of this policy. Second, the OLNPP policy adds a social or moral dimension to urban energy policies. The norm change from an environmental and economic focus to a focus on the combination of social, environmental, and economic considerations is a unique contribution of the OLNPP policy to urban experiments in energy transition. Third, we find that experiments through purposive interventions serve as a means for facilitating urban energy governance where the actors involved can communicate and enhance their new ideas and practices.

A comparative analysis of urban energy governance in four European cities

Cities are at the forefront of efforts to combat climate change and in this paper, we examine the influence of urban energy governance on these policy goals. An innovative framework for quantifying the combined governance of cities and energy systems is presented before focusing on a detailed study of London, Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen. By applying an optimization model to assess the lowest cost technology pathways to achieve emission reduction targets, the links between the governance of urban energy systems and the cost of achieving carbon targets are shown. Additionally a novel metric of scenario similarity is introduced in order to evaluate the difficulty of hypothesized energy system transitions. The results indicate that these tools can be valuable in identifying similar cities for the sharing of best practice, for performing comparative evaluations of energy transitions, and for reinforcing the need to complement quantitative assessments with a more holistic appreciation of local context.