Urban Energy Transition Research Articles

Smart gridlock? Challenging hegemonic framings of mitigation solutions and scalability

Urban energy transitions are key components of urgently requisite climate change mitigation. Promissory discourse accords smart grids pride of place within them. We employ a living lab to study smart grids as a solution geared towards upscaling and systematisation, investigate their limits as a climate change mitigation solution, and assess them rigorously as urban energy transitions. Our 18 month living lab simulates a household energy management platform in Bergen. Norway’s mitigation focus promotes smart meter roll-out as reducing carbon emissions, by (i) unlocking efficiency gains, and (ii) increasing awareness for demand-side management. We problematise this discourse. Raising awareness encounters intractable challenges for smart grid scalability. Scattered efficiency gains constitute modest increments rather than the substantial change requisite for rapid mitigation. Whereas promissory smart grid discourse overlooks these ground-truthed limits, our findings caution against misplaced expectations concerning mitigation. We contest discursive enthusiasm on smart grids and argue for aligning local and systemic concerns before upscaling to avoid obscuring risks. Scaling up requires understanding and addressing interdependencies and trade-offs across scales. Focus group discussions and surveys with living lab participants who used sub-meter monitors to track real-time household electricity consumption data over an extended period show that technical issues and energy behaviour, as well as political economic and policy structures and factors, pose significant limits to smart grids. Urban strategies for climate change mitigation must be informed by this recognition. Our results indicate that upscaling relies on bottom-up popular acceptance of the salient technical, organisational and standardisation measures, but that measures to improve the democratic legitimacy of and participation in energy transitions remain weak. We highlight limits to smart grids as a standalone urban mitigation solution and call for a sharper focus on accompanying thrust areas for systematisation and scalability, such as renewable energy integration and grid coordination.

Politics of urban energy transitions: new energy vehicle (NEV) development in Shenzhen, China

ABSTRACTCities are critical arenas for low-carbon energy transitions as a means to address challenges of climate change and sustainable development. The unfolding transition politics during new energy vehicle (NEV) implementation in Shenzhen, China are explored. Two competing processes of urban energy transitions (destabilizing and stabilizing dominant regimes) confront each other in the battleground of urban materiality, particularly the construction of charging infrastructure. Reflexive and interactive transition governance would highlight the learning and adjustment capacities of not only policymakers but also other transition actors.

Economic evaluation of Nearly Zero Energy Cities

As a contribution to the study of the urban energy transition, this paper proposes a novel model of energy-economic evaluation of the cities self-sufficiency and presents its application in the form of a case study. The objective of this study was to analyse the scope of the investment in the photovoltaic self-consumption of buildings in order to promote the creation of Prosumers communities within the cities. The operation of this model is based on the scalability of the Nearly Zero Energy concept from buildings to cities and seeks to evaluate Nearly Zero Energy Cities (nZEC): cities made up of Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (nZEB) and other installations of distributed generation to cover their energy demand by use of local renewable resources to the detriment of external resources. By using public data, we apply this model with the aim of economically evaluating the investment of six packages of energy rehabilitation and photovoltaic self-consumption in 17% of the residential buildings (37,800) in the city of Barcelona. To do this, we simulated 37 years of electricity distribution among Consumers, Producers and a hypothetical peer-to-peer community of Prosumers during the period 2014–2050 in hourly time intervals. The results indicated that the photovoltaic self-consumption and the local markets of Prosumers help to reduce primary energy consumption, the energy costs, and the CO2 emissions.

Community solar energy initiatives in urban energy transitions: A comparative study of Foshan, China and Seoul, South Korea

Urban community solar energy initiatives have flourished around the world, suggesting that community energy can be an important pathway for energy transitions. The deployment of solar energy has however remained limited. The complexity of these community-level transition processes has not been well understood and conceptualised. By advancing studies on community energy and socio-technical energy transitions, this paper proposes an integrated framework to conceptualise community-level energy initiatives from a systemic perspective. The framework builds the linkages among five critical processes and their associated contexts and outcomes, and is applied in a comparative study of two cities in Asia: Foshan and Seoul. Based on 19 semi-structured interviews in the case cities, this study has three major findings. First, the two cities’ solarisation pathways exhibited similarities as well as differences that could be understood within our conceptual framework. Second, distinctive modes of community solarisation can be identified in the two cities. Foshan was a mixed mode which was characterised by a combination of top-down, state-led and entrepreneur-driven approaches, whereas Seoul developed a bottom-up grassroot-driven transition. Third, the actual impacts of community solarisation on regime shifts appeared to be very modest, but we identify important reinforcing effects between some processes and local contextual factors. This paper concludes that community energy can play an important role in urban energy transitions, but that sufficient policy attention must be given to complex interactions in the critical processes.

Introduction: The challenges of the urban energy transition

Introduction: The challenges of the urban energy transition

Urban energy transitions in ordinary cities: Philadelphia’s place-based policy innovations for socio-technical energy change in the commercial sector

ABSTRACT Studies of urban energy transitions place less attention to governance dynamics in diversified contexts. This paper thus focuses on an ordinary city, Philadelphia, and its place-based policy innovations in commercial energy efficiency. It develops an analytical framework at the intersection of multi-level governance and socio-technical urban energy change, which applies for a set of key policy initiatives in Philadelphia. The analysis demonstrates the importance of local and broader economic conditions, as well as actor political orientations, for the city’s transformative capacity. It also offers a fine-grained view of transition actors, stressing the key role of third-sector entities for systemic change.

Urban energy transitions and rural income generation: Sustainable opportunities for rural development through charcoal production

Sub-Saharan Africa’s charcoal sector is rarely considered a mechanism for rural development or poverty alleviation; instead, current regulations often marginalise rural producers. The development of a sustainable sector, that does not further marginalise rural populations, is restricted by limited understanding of these stakeholders. We assess the heterogeneity of rural producers supplying two differentially sized urban charcoal markets in Mozambique. Drawing on data from 767 household surveys, our findings suggest that the size of the urban market affects the type of rural producer and their scales of production. Overall household income of producers supplying the larger urban market were proportionally more dependent on charcoal for income generation; small-scale producers in particular relied most on charcoal income, contributing >95% of household incomes. In contrast, producers supplying the smaller market had more diversified incomes, and were thus less dependent on charcoal income. Larger-scale producers were generally wealthier; their absolute incomes were higher and they were proportionally the least dependent on charcoal income. Further findings suggest that rural charcoal production was not necessarily the domain of the poorest of the poor and the existence of producers trapped in small-scale production may be a consequence of larger urban markets, rather than an intrinsic characteristic of the sector. Predicted growth of smaller urban areas and associated higher demand for charcoal will provide substantial opportunities for rural income generation, most likely leading to shifts in producers and production scales. Rather than transferring existing formal approaches, which marginalise rural stakeholders, small urban areas provide opportunities to develop equitable production systems, with potential to deliver sustainable energy and rural development. The heterogeneity of rural producers calls for better-targeted interventions that incorporate the importance of charcoal production for rural livelihoods.

Socio-technical experiments from the bottom-up: The initial stage of solar water heater adoption in a ‘weak’ civil society

Recent years have witnessed the proliferation of urban experiments responding to low-carbon and sustainable transitions. There is a tendency of prioritizing the role of government interventions in transitions while neglecting the agency of other parties. This tendency is especially true in China, where an authoritarian governance dominates the transition process. The Rizhao case, however, exhibited a distinct bottom-up pattern in the early-stage development of solar water heater (SWH) technology, when both the civil society and the market were still immature. Through this rare case of urban energy transitions in China, this study looks into the sociotechnical experiments from the bottom-up. The study shows that before the intervention of local governments, a niche market of SWH technology was established and consolidated successfully in Rizhao through the mutual effects of both resident-led social experimentation and entrepreneur-led technological experimentation. The study further uncovers that in a less-developed civil society in China, the diffusion of novel innovations relied heavily on interpersonal social networks.

Public support for wood smoke mitigation policies in south-central Chile

This study analyzes the role of the affect heuristic, risk perceptions, and air quality and sociodemographic factors in the support for policies to control urban air pollution. The sample includes 489 participants residing in Temuco and Padre Las Casas, suburban areas located in southern Chile, affected by the smoke that wood-burning stoves and cookers produce. In line with previous studies, the results show that the rejection of pollution mitigation policies is associated with a positive affect to heat homes with wood. Awareness and risk perception also seem to be relevant factors, but the effect of the latter on the support for policies ceases to be significant when it is controlled by key sociodemographic variables such as household income. The study findings contribute to the theories of processing information about risk, when suggesting that emotions and awareness play an important role in the support for policies to control air pollution and that, also, structural factors like household income cannot be avoided. Finally, the implications for urban energy transition processes are discussed.

A Study on Sustainable Development Strategy Driven by Energy Transition for Suzhou

City is the main body of energy consumption, and also the main battlefield of energy transition. With the proposal of energy revolution strategy called “four revolutions and one cooperation”, urban energy transition becomes an important proposition in national energy pattern. Suzhou proposed the declaration of building an international energy transition development model city and explores the impact of energy on urban sustainable development by taking itself as a sample. Based on the experience of energy transition in London and analysis of economic, energy and industrial structure in Suzhou, this paper puts forward the sustainable development goals of Suzhou and studies strategies for the Suzhou sustainable development through bow-string-arrow theory model of Suzhou energy transition. This paper argues that Suzhou needs to further deepen the clean energy and energy conservation, at the same time, promote upgrading and optimization of city industrial structure through technical innovation and policy guarantee, so as to achieve rapid and high quality economic growth, and promote comprehensive energy efficiency.

Eco-Spirituality in Environmental Action


 There is a rising debate about the religious dimensions of environmentalism. A prominent approach to this phenomenon is Bron Taylor’s Dark Green Religion. Taylor assumes that Dark Green Religion is a globally growing phenomenon which involves “para-religious” perceptions and feelings towards nature. Followers of Dark Green Religion would experience feelings of connectedness to nature, consider it to be sacred and of intrinsic value, and reject anthropocentrism. I discuss Taylor’s argument in the light of a study on an urban energy transition process in Northern Germany. Interviewing actors strongly participating in this process, I find some evidence for features of Dark Green Religion while also revealing their ongoing anthropocentric orientations. The findings suggest a need for more in-depth studies to improve our understanding of eco-religious worldviews among environmentally engaged actors and their impact on sustainability transitions.
 
 

Multiscalar governance of urban energy transitions in Australia: The cases of Sydney and Melbourne

Sustainable energy transitions – broadly described as moving away from fossil fuels toward renewable resources and reducing energy demand– are emerging across the world, albeit in uneven ways. Scholarship on energy transitions has highlighted the importance of how these transitions may be facilitated or impeded by both governance and politics, and the influence of urban dynamics and histories on these transitions. Using an emphasis on multiscalar governance, this paper analyses emergent energy reconfigurations in Australia, with two purposes. The first is to understand more richly the dynamics that are differentially reworking possibilities for more sustainable energy infrastructure and energy demand in a fossil-fuel dependent nation. Second, we focus on the role of cities, considering the workings of urban energy transitions, most especially through governing the materiality of urban commercial space. Drawing on empirical examples from Australia’s two largest cities we suggest that the urban is a crucial nexus through which energy transitions are instigated, manifest and contested. We conclude by confirming that the strategic pursuit of political-economic interests of the urban, in partnership with other state and non-state actors, creates opportunities for energy transitions rendered difficult by institutional and material obduracies.

Urban Energy Landscapes and the Rise of Heat Networks in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACTIn the past decade, district heat networks have emerged as a key strategy for the UK government to achieve its 2050 decarbonization targets. Reports and analyses have focused on the technical and economic challenges of introducing networked heat provision in a country where this is a relatively novel energy service. Meanwhile, there has been little emphasis on the spatial and physical aspects of heat provision and their influence on the spatial development of cities. In this paper, we contribute to current debates on urban energy transitions with insights on the implications of heat networks to cities including scale, density, mixed-use, and materiality. The study reveals the embeddedness of energy services and the emergence of new forms of local governance that combine spatial and energy planning to realize new urban energy landscapes.

Urban Energy Transitions: Why It Is Challenging To Govern Them And How They Govern Themselves

Urban Energy Transitions: Why It Is Challenging To Govern Them And How They Govern Themselves

From Problems to Potentials—The Urban Energy Transition of Gruž, Dubrovnik

In the challenge for a sustainable society, carbon-neutrality is a critical objective for all cities in the coming decades. In the EU City-zen project, academic partners collaborate to develop an urban energy transition methodology, which supports cities in making the energy transition to sustainable lifestyles and carbon neutrality. As part of the project, so-called Roadshows are organised in cities that wish to take the first step toward zero-energy living. Each Roadshow is methodologically composed to allow sustainability experts from across Europe to co-create designs, strategies and timelines with local stakeholders in order to reach this vital goal. Following a precursory investigative student workshop (the SWAT Studio), Dubrovnik was the third city to host the Roadshow in November 2016. During these events the characteristics of Dubrovnik, and the district of Gruž in particular, were systematically analysed, leading to useful insights into the current problems and potentials of the city. In close collaboration with local stakeholders, the team proposed a series of interventions, validated by the calculation of carbon emission, to help make Gruž, and in its wake the whole city of Dubrovnik, net zero energy and zero carbon. The vision presented to the inhabitants and its key city decision makers encompassed a path towards an attainable sustainable future. The strategies and solutions proposed for the Dubrovnik district of Gruž were able to reduce the current carbon sequestration compensation of 1200 hectares of forestland to only 67 hectares, an area achievable by urban reforestation projects. This paper presents the City-zen methodology of urban energy transition and that of the City-zen Roadshow, the analysis of the city of Dubrovnik, proposed interventions and the carbon impact, as calculated by means of the carbon accounting method discussed in the paper.

Exogenous shocks, social skill, and power: Urban energy transitions as social fields

The constantly growing scholarship on urban energy transitions needs a framework to analyze these transitions. This article proposes the Field Perspective (FP) as an approach for the study of urban energy transitions. FP analyses how the interplay of actors, who are dedicated to a similar purpose, and the structures guiding this interplay, co-evolve. By applying FP to the energy transition in the German city Emden, the article shows how the transition evolves through (a) alterations in the exogenous context of the city (e.g. national feed-in-tariffs for renewables), (b) the social skill and changing interplay of local actors engaged in the transition, and (c) the emergence of power-constellations and rules.

Interdependence between Urban Processes and Energy Transitions: The Dimensions of Urban Energy Transitions (DUET) Framework

This paper presents a framework to study the interdependence between urban processes and energy transitions – the Dimensions of Urban Energy Transitions (DUET) framework. The framework emerges from current debates about the need to incorporate systematically the spatial and political dimensions of urban energy transitions. We seek to develop a systematic framework that brings together well-established principles of transitions theory with insights from recent debates about how transitions unfold in urban contexts. Illustrated through a comparative meta-analysis of 29 case studies of urban energy transitions, the DUET framework provides an approach that considers simultaneously three dimensions of energy transitions: socio-technical experimentation, urban political processes, and socio-spatial (re)configuration. The three dimensions interact closely with each other and together enforce ‘transitions of cities’. From DUET framework, it argues that alignment between industry interests and territorial priorities is key to meaningful energy transitions.

Urban energy transition in China: Insights from trends, socioeconomic drivers, and environmental impacts of Beijing

The coal-dominated energy structure has not only fueled China's rapid economic development, but also brought great pressure on China. Promoting energy transition is among the great challenges for China. As one of the most developed megacities in China, Beijing promotes energy transition intensively. In this study, we explored the trends, socioeconomic drivers and environmental impacts of the energy transition process in Beijing during the decades. We found that Beijing's energy transition has gone through four typical stages. After a parallel growth between the economy and coal-dominated energy consumption at beginning, the growth rate of energy consumption has gradually slowed down since 1996. Between 2000 and 2007, the energy structure became relatively balanced and diversified, driven by the changes of energy intensity, energy structure, and final demand composition, along with the economic structure's shift from heavy manufacturing to service. Thereafter, economic development was seriously decoupled from direct energy consumption, and the de-coal trend had made remarkable achievements. SO2 and NOx emissions have declined significantly since 2007. Diversified energy structure based on the de-coal trend, cleaner energy, and economic restructuring promotes energy transition. Meanwhile the feasibility of implementation also should be considered in other cities’ energy transition process in China.

The governance of urban energy transitions: A comparative study of solar water heating systems in two Chinese cities

This paper examines how urban energy transitions are unfolding in China, in relation to the deployment of solar water heating (SWH) systems in two Chinese cities, Rizhao and Shenzhen. Cities play a significant role in the energy transition in China. Scholarly efforts have looked into the translation of top-down visions into locally actionable policy. This article contributes to this body of research with an analysis of the urban governance of urban energy transitions in China, and how low carbon technologies are deployed in particular urban contexts. The comparative analysis of Rizhao and Shenzhen suggests that specific socio-spatial arrangements shape the evolutionary trajectories of urban energy transitions of SWH systems in both cities. In the case of Rizhao, policy approaches have been erratic. Nevertheless, governmental and civil society actors have worked to forge alignment among political visions, built environment constraints, and social practices. The proximity of an industrial cluster supporting SWH technology and the early uptake of this technology by households are two key factors that explain the rapid spread of SWH systems in Rizhao. In Shenzhen, the local government has promoted SWH systems through regulation and incentives in a top-down and coordinated manner. These programmes have been, however, abandoned, after they did not deliver the expected results. The two contrasting cases suggest that the urban energy transition in China is the result of the coordinated actions of multiple actors, and success depends on the fit between technologies and the urban development contexts, rather than on aggressive government-sponsored actions.

Urban brownfield redevelopment and energy transition pathways: A review of planning policies and practices in Freiburg

This paper explores the role of urban brownfield redevelopment in navigating and enhancing energy transition in the built environment by conducting a case study of three city districts in Freiburg: ...