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https://doi.org/10.5278/ijsepm.3502
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INTRODUCTION: Why a Virtual Round Table on Innovation for Smart and Sustainable Cities?
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Innovation is, according to the definition given in Innovation in Firms: A Microeconomic Perspective, OECD, 2009, the "implementation of a new significantly improved product, good, service, or process, a new marketing method, or a new organizational method in business practices, workplace organization or external relations". We know that innovation can be incremental -in terms of optimization of existing products, services or systems -or radical such as innovations which dramatically change social and business practices, and create new markets. Concerning the urban dimension, specifically sustainable urban development, it appears clear that incremental improvement, whilst potentially important, could not be sufficient to bring the required structural change. Cities are indeed the best place to experiment innovation as its societal dimension is characterized by a combination of technology, infrastructure, production systems, policy, legislation, user practices and cultural meaning. Moreover cities are interconnected social, technical and ecological systems made by people, infrastructures, buildings, flows, functions and services. Cities are the principle engines of innovation and economic growth.
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[
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"section_content": "However, urban activities consume a significant amount of resources, generate waste and pollution, and cause structural depreciation. Due to our increasingly globalised production and consumption systems, negative environmental impacts are felt locally and globally. To achieve sustainable urban development, targeted growth in key technology sectors, is required to provide the infrastructure and solutions that support operations and behaviours which reduce the negative environmental impact caused by urban life and urban development. It is a shared opinion that sustainability challenges cities are facing cannot be approached and supported by traditional disciplinary modes of research, innovation and funding as the limitation due to working with the silos approach is misleading. This does not mean that there is only one pathway to support the transition to sustainable urban development. This Virtual Round Table on innovation for Smart and Sustainable Cities compares pathways experimented in three different country in Europe: Netherlands thanks to the point of view of Han Brezet, Sweden thanks to Jonas Bylund, and las but not least Italy thanks to the contribution of Giovanni Vetritto. Added value is the foreword provided by Peter Berkowitz Head of Unit -Smart and Sustainable Growth, Directorate General for Regional and Urban Policy, European Commission. I would like to thank all of them and express my sincere appreciation for their contribution.provide a guiding framework to address both the environmental and social dimension of moving to net zero-carbon societies.However, there are many uncertainties regarding potential pathways towards the achievement of deep societal and economic transformations necessary to achieve this shift.Indeed, given the diverse starting points and the magnitude of the changes for our economies and societies, this will affect unevenly citizens, regions and sectors across Europe. ",
"section_name": "",
"section_num": ""
},
{
"section_content": "For instance, many parts of Europe need to diversify their economies as they move out of carbon-intensive or coal activities.Fast growing regions face different types of challenges, such as increasing congestion, growing energy demand and population pressures.With increasing urbanisation, cities and urban areas will even play an increased role in this transition.At the same time, the involvement of rural areas will be essential, notably as regards the sustainable production of food and renewable energy sources. Public, private and civil society actors at local level will deliver these changes on the ground.The European Union will play an important role in supporting them to deliver a just and inclusive transition.This means a process of transition that is good for people, manageable at local level, benefits our businesses whilst at the same time leads to the necessary greenhouse gas emissions reductions and less pressure on the environment. ",
"section_name": "Virtual round table on innovation for smart and sustainable cities",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "In order to facilitate a process of deep transition, Europe needs new policy approaches to promote emerging industries and new value chains, based on breakthrough technologies.Businesses need access to technical knowledge and the expertise of other actors to develop innovative solutions and participate in new value-chains.Further action is therefore needed to facilitate deeper strategic inter-regional collaboration along industrial value chains.By building on investment in areas identified as part of smart specialisation strategies, participants in the quadruple helix can identify new areas of potential collaboration. Smart specialisation strategies within the EU's Cohesion Policy ensures that industry, researchers, public sector and civil society work together to identifying business needs and local opportunities for investment in innovation.These strategies are a pre-condition for Cohesion policy support -€41 billion for the 2014-2020 period -to areas of innovation-led growth potential.Energy has been one of the most common areas chosen in these national and regional smart specialisation strategies.This means that significant funding in the area will also be available and more importantly opportunities for cooperation.To support the cooperation and have real projects across the energy innovation chain, the Commission is promoting the creation of partnerships between the interested regions.These partnerships aim at connecting regions with similar smart specialisation priorities and helping them realise innovative projects across the value chain.So far, five partnerships have launched in the area of energy -on marine renewable energy, on bioenergy, on sustainable construction, on smart grids, and on solar energy. In order to test new approaches to developing innovative solutions to transition, the Commission has launched two pilots (European Union 2018).One of the pilots is ",
"section_name": "Deep transition requires new solutions",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "aimed to help interregional innovation projects across value chains, including on energy (for sustainable construction and for marine renewable energy).The other pilot supports the industrial transition of regions that are experiencing specific structural challenges linked to technological change and the transition to a low-carbon economy.The results of these pilots will feed into the development of smart specialisation strategies post-2020. ",
"section_name": "DIALOGUE",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Engaging stakeholders in regional and city planning and economic development processes increases the ownership and better embeds action in the local setting.Many cities have organised public consultations and citizen involvement in projects with EU funds and the partnership principle is, for example, a cohesion policy requirement.However, more can be done to increase the role of cities and to engage citizens across Europe. An example of such engagement is the Urban Agenda for the EU, which aims to strengthen the urban dimension in EU policies and to improve the involvement of urban authorities in their design and implementation.The agenda represents a new multi-level working method promoting cooperation between Member States, cities, the European Commission and other stakeholders through thematic partnerships.Work on the fourteen partnerships is currently ongoing covering key urban and related low-carbon transition themes1 .It shows that collaboration between different levels and broad engagement of stakeholders can give a multitude of solutions to concrete problems cities face that are tailored to the needs of these cities. ",
"section_name": "The role of cities needs to be further strengthened in managing the low carbon transition",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "The EU funds -although small compared to the investment needs -play an important role in stimulating the change on the ground.In particular, EU cohesion policy has a long experience in supporting industrial and environmental transition of Europe's regions.It provides financial support for investments in a wide range of areas that contribute to smart, sustainable and inclusive growth and jobs.More importantly, Cohesion policy also represents a policy framework for integrated territorial development and is particularly well suited to address issues related to structural change, working in partnership with actors on the ground in a place-based and holistic approach. For example, in the current 2014-2020 funding period, EU cohesion policy provides substantial support for the realisation the Energy Union on the ground.This includes significant funding of EUR 69 billion -or around EUR 92 billion with national public and private co-financing -for investments in a variety of projects across the five Energy Union dimensions.Implementation is progressing well, with 71% of the total funding allocated to projects by end 2018.Importantly, this support goes beyond funding and cohesion policy provides Member States, regions and cities with administrative capacity building and technical assistance and cross-border cooperation possibilities, so that investments actually contribute to a real and lasting transition. For the 2021-2027 period, Cohesion policy will continue to put a strong emphasis on supporting a clean and fair energy transition, by supporting innovation and the deployment of new solutions.It will do so by supporting Europe's cities and regions to anticipate and manage the energy transition in a targeted and tailored manner.The regulatory proposals offer a shorter, modern menu of priorities to build smart, green, low-carbon and more social Europe.Urban and territorial aspects are given more prominence with a separate priority objective.Finally, the Commission has proposed a dedicated instrument to support the development of interregional value chains as well as reinforcing the commitment to the Urban Agenda with the European Urban Initiative. ",
"section_name": "EU funds to support deployment of new solutions",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "",
"section_name": "DIALOGUE",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Europe must accelerate its transition towards a carbon-neutral economy.This can only be achieved by the full engagement of regions and cities in a process of deep transition.Through Cohesion policy, the European Union will strengthen its support to this process, notably through support to smart specialisation, deployment of new solutions and development of value chains.However, success will depend on engaging all relevant actors at all levels.This will require new ways of working, the development of new models of public sector management and a deeper understanding of the policies that can facilitate system change at subnational level. International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management Vol.24 2019 163-178 ",
"section_name": "Concluding remarks",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "A dialogue between Paola Clerici Maestosi, Han Brezet (NL), Jonas Bylund (SE) and Giovanni Vetritto (IT) ",
"section_name": "DIALOGUE POINTS OF VIEW",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Han Brezet: The developments of the last ca.50 years in The Netherlands cannot be well understood without the history model of Braudel, distinguishing between three type of waves in societal development: the longer term, conjuncture waves and events (Smith, 1992).In our case, without the \"House of Europe\", and its institutionalization including innovation aimed policies and instruments such as the different innovation related directorates and R&D programs, which could be seen as part of the longer-term wave, developments in the national innovation ecosystem cannot be well explained.However, ceteris paribus, here we will focus mainly on the conjunctural waves, with events mostly as their illustrations.We argue that in The Netherlands within the conjuncture a 'polder (wetland) paradox' exists in which at the same time NPM models survive and new forms of MPG pop up, living in co-existence (Celik, 2018) In The Netherlands this goes back to the creation of large parts of the country -the long-term wave-of land reclamation, dike building and water works engineering and management.From its' origin, this required on the one hand village level initiative, entrepreneurship, skills and local co-design and cooperation but on the other hand governance within the region and country, leading to the establishment of regional Water Board bodies, as multi-stakeholder entities, including representatives from the higher national levels.(Mostert, 2017) This historically grown governance model -partly due to its geographical position below the sea-level and experienced flooding danger from both rivers and the sea-is still at the core of today's approach of innovation in the country: while the Water Boards can be regarded as examples of semi-self-steering NPM agencies, using a decentralized service delivery model, at the same time their daily program consists of co-developing and co-managing their waterworks related activities with a variety of actors, using a MPG-like multi-stakeholder approach: the Dutch innovation governance paradox. Therefore, both developments can be observed during the last decades.In areas such as health care, social care (elderly, youth), social building sector, energy sector and education definitely the private-style corporate governance model has been dominant.However, this has lead in various cases to lower quality of public goods' services and personnel dissatisfaction in many ways and areas, due to too intensive competition on common good markets, where instead cooperation and joint planning would make sense, like in the care for the elderly. A NPM-adapting movement can now be observed in The Netherlands, building theoretically strongly on the model of Mazzucato (Mazzucato, 2018), which acknowledges a crucial guiding and facilitating role for governments in societal relevant innovation in stead of leaving this to business and privatized government agencies.Such an approach has to bring back responsibilities close to governments or avoid market competition in common good areas. A less shock wise and more insidious, though very significant MPG-related trend in the Netherlands' innovation ecosystem stems from the design disciplines.Starting 50 years ago at the Delft University of Technology as the new discipline 'industrial form giving', today design thinking and industrial design disciplines have reached all capillaries of society, not only in higher education institutes, industries, but also in governments at all levels, within consultancies and other members of the quadruple helix.By joining forces with the art disciplines, a new and powerful business sector has emerged, the 'Creative Industry', which is now cooperating intensively with the more traditional R&D and technology oriented industry and innovation sectors.Nearly all higher education institutes in the country have a department for design, or have design thinking in their missions and programs, leading to a significant change in innovation paradigm, where user involvement, multi-stakeholder engagement, out-of-the-box solutions, creativity tools and methods, and common good -United Nations (UN, 2017)-goals orientation are becoming standard.Top-down, government is stimulating this with both institutionalization and Creative Industry aimed programs.Furthermore, this trend is supported by the philosophy of Richard Florida on the creative class (Florida, 2012 ) and by Dutch -mostly sustainability driven-innovation thinkers' theories, conceptualized as Transitions Theory or Sociotechnical Transitions Theory (Geels, Elzen & Green, 2004. Sovacool, 2017. Ceschin & Gaziulusoy, 2019).This philosophy, which is quite influential in the country, suggests that -radical-societal transitions can occur via interactions among three levels: the niche, the regime and the landscape. Here, the Dutch Paradox is expressed quite clearly: a hybrid governance model, top-down oriented at creating new rules and entities at a distance -regimes-for -sustainable-innovation, with their semi-private mission and tasks, while at the same time design thinking=joint product-and service development and management notions and practices infiltrate all levels of society, starting bottom-up in niches. Jonas Bylund: Yes and no.There is an increasing awareness not just in planing and organisational studies but also in public sector and administration development circuits that the New Public Management (NPM) approach perhaps did not lead to the anticipated -or promised -effects. The point of departure for NPM in Sweden was tied up in a push for devolution and increased local democracy in local democratic settings, i.e. municipalities.The effects were rather 'headless chicken' (Barrett 2004) and that more and more issues and challenges in the everyday work of local urban governance falls between chairs.The need stems from a sense that current issues and concerns, particularly challenges around the UN Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals, escape the current sectoral and silo organisation of most public admininstrations.In a way, it is a kind of emergent public, although with a focus on public administrative persons and capacities rather than the typical civil society and other in the neo-pragmatic resurgence over the last decades (cf.Marres 2010). Hence, after a couple decades with NPM reforms: 'What we can see, then, is that an administration that was initially relatively independent has become even more \"bottom heavy\" since the 1980s…' (Hall 2013: 409); since 'Public-sector management in Sweden used to be characterised by its relatively detailed, hands-on nature, while at the same time allowing a certain latitude: within their budgetary frameworks and outside areas that were regulated in detail, public authorities could, in principle, do what they liked…' (Hall 2013: 408) Of course, Swedish municipalities still retains their 'planning monopoly' on land-use (except areas of national interest in terms of e.g. military or biotope importance).This means that there is less to vertically integrate from a municipal local governance point of view.(On the Swedish territorial admininistrative set up, see e.g Bäck 2003). By NPM and its role in European planing and policy, I rely mainly on the understanding conveyed by Barrett's (2004, pp. 257) more than a decade old synthesis on the field of policy implementation.Here, the sense of NPM is the transfer (and not really translation) of business and industry management principles and practices onto In Sweden, then, the sense at the moment is not that multi-level public governance simply succeeds NPM.Firstly, since NPM is also an effect of the rise of governance (as a poltical science concept) in contrast to mid-20th Century understandings of government in the West. Secondly, because multi-level public governance as a counter-movement to NPM (if it can be characterised as such given the general governance charactersistics just mentioned) is probably better understood in Sweden as New Public Governance (NPG).Although NPG is not strictly a counter-movemen, there seems to be a nonlinear move from the one to the other, and in parallell by a rather more focus on what we might call New Public Services (NPM) to stem and rectify the effects of NPM -and which has been around simultaneously as NPM proper.A contrast between NPG and NPS might be seen in the former's focus on organisational capacity whereas the latter is more focused on the product and delivering the service, so to speak.The former, in terms of promoting innovation, works more in terms of Public Innovation Governance, whereas the latter is more about Public Service Innovation. However, it's never that easy.The shift is not a clearcut one and it seems, when talking to colleagues out in 'the system' that all three occurr at the same time and are currently active ways of structuring everyday urban planning and management, in different degrees in various municipalities. There is, of course, a distinction to be made on innovating public services, on the one side, and innovation governance, on the other.The former has more to do with the products and services the Swedish public sector is to provide in some or the other way and where e.g.schools, primary education, transport and mobility, public utilities and housing was privatised in different and varied degrees during NPM reforms.The latter, public innovation governance, has more to do with the capacity to enable, support, and innovate in complex governance situations.(cf.OECD 2011; EC 2011) However, the multilevel governance aspects may be more appropriate to understand as NPG? Giovanni Vetritto: The sunset of NPM comes from a functional and theory point and not from a technological point; nevertheless, ICT gave the main instruments to overcome its impasse world (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992;OECD, 2005). The prevalent address of NPM from the late 1980s to the early 1990s (Pollitt & Bouckaert, 2004), led lately to a general disaffection with that approach, especially in the countries that experimented it in a deeper and pervasive way (like New Zealand and Great Britain); then the new paradigm of MPG rose on totally different socioeconomic and organizational principles (Vetritto, 2010). In the context of a strong revival of the free market neoclassical approach, NPM inspired reforms that were reduced to the logic of microeconomic efficiency.The only admitted public value to be produced was the sum of separate single microeconomic efficient services.As a consequence, a number of quasi-markets for single administrative services or products were enabled. As a matter of fact, NPM was not the adoption of managerial technicalities in the skills matrix of public managers; it was a comprehensive organizational and institutional rebuilding that gave start to the so-called process of agencification (Christensen & Laegreid, 2006;Verhoest, 2017): the outsourcing of public single-product bodies with business goals and models. The most ambitious reform in this sense was realized in New Zealand during the '90s, and since the early years of the new century saw dissatisfaction and changes of address, because, on the one hand, the fixing of medium and long term microeconomic performance goals in separate agencies precluded wider, integrated and horizontal policies with more ambitious goals; on the other hand, the \"business oriented\" approach came to predominate in the electoral circuit (citizens -parliaments -governs) in the pursuit of more complex goals, other than the saving of resources, for example in the changing of socioeconomic conditions considered unequal or in any sense not approved by the majority of the electoral body (Rennie, 2005). The most important criticism to the NPM model, anyway, moved on a different level: it implied the inadequacy of the \"quasi-market\" logic on a conceptual and cognitive basis. NPM was based on the wrong assumption of considering means and goals of the administrative (and political) action as known.That was barely possible in the small number of years that saw the prevalence of the neoclassic revenge, of the minimal State and of the self-regulation of rationale social actors disputed.Until then the simple contractual or quasi-contractual logic was considered sufficient to solve the main collective problems and challenges. When this prevalence started to unravel, long before the major crisis of 2008, preferences and orientations of the majority of citizens started moving to the request of more demanding and integrated policies, which the contractual and business-oriented model couldn't afford to give (Guy Peters & Pierre, 1998). For a number of years, the world blindly believed only in the return to the logic of the invisible hand and of the pull of efficiency.The technological revolution that started at the end of the last century gave to the economic actors more and more room for efficiency gains and organizational rationalizations, leading to the overcoming of Fordism.In more recent years, the same technologies have given the economic actors a new awareness about the chance to reconsider transactional, organizational and operational choices using the network model, the \"coopetition\" dynamics, and more interconnected relations between private and public sector: the referring is to the concept of milieu innovateur theorized in the nineties by Manuel Castells (2010).On a territorial level, there has been a rediscovery (Hidalgo, Klinger, Barabàsi & Hausmann, 2007) of the Hirschmanian economic theory of agglomerations (Hirschman, 1958(Hirschman, , 1963(Hirschman, , 1967)), highlighting the basic value of social capital and distributed knowledge (Dahrendorf, 1959(Dahrendorf, , 2003)). The revenge of the market versus the State left progressively room to a new awareness about the inextricable connection of the public and private sectors, especially by means of the new \"connective\" and \"cooperative\" ICT technologies.What once, in the words of the most important Italian political scientist of the last century, was the \"great dichotomy\" between \"public\" and \"private\" became a syncretism of both (Bobbio, 1974). A number of cultural developments stemmed from this change of attitude in policy making: from the new success of the theory of capitalism of Karl Polanyi (2013), to the Nobel prize of a thinker like Elinor Ostrom (2007), who dedicated her entire research life tearing down the enemy's myths of the Leviathan State and of the self-regulating invisible hand market.Ten years ago important scholars already declared the NPM overcome (Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow & Tinkler, 2006); the reason for that is the more useful and elastic methodology offered by the MPG in shaping and conducting public policies in the era of new digital means; an era characterized exactly by being digital. ",
"section_name": "Paola Clerici Maestosi: The shift from New Public Management to Multilevel Public Governance lies on promoting innovation in public administration. Has this process taken place in your country?",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Han Brezet: The shift from an at first instance institutional and NPM-oriented innovation policy is now more and more enriched with and based upon MPG-elements. Good illustrations of modern MPG approaches can be for instance found in the higher education and sustainable innovation area. The Dutch science agenda is now aligned with general public participation on urgent societal issues: via an intensive consultation of the general public's opinion by means of questionnaires, interviews and group International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management Vol.24 2019 163-178 DIALOGUE meetings as well as modern digital media, during the period 2015-2018, 11.700 research questions have been gathered from the Dutch population as relevant inputs for the national science agenda.Via a joint design process of scientists, policy makers and government departments, knowledge users, industry sectors and civil society, these issues have been translated into 140 clustered problem areas and 25 'grand challenges' knowledge routes, including structural funding of more than € 130 million per year.This national science agenda is shared with regional science programs from one or more provinces and with innovation strategy agenda's of cities. (Ministerie OCW, 2018.)In line with this development, new programs with enlarged bottom-up project options have been designed for polytechnics and SMEs as well as local Innovation Labs, Design Factories and incubators intensively promoted and facilitated.But a major role also can be distinguished here for the universities and other higher education institutes, who during the last decades very successfully, bottom up, are stimulating innovation via spin offs and new ventures at their campuses, both with a low-and high-tech character. From these and other examples, various lessons also can be learned with respect to orchestration and governance in digital platform ecosystems (Mukhopadhyay & Bouwman, 2019). ",
"section_name": "Paola Clerici Maestosi: Which are the most innovative instruments and fields/domain of application?",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "The applications or, rather, exploratory settings to develop public admnistrative innovation in Sweden does not necessarily follow the multilevel public governance recipe, but rather starts to organise around innovation capacities and around 'boundary spanners' and supporting mechanisms such as the Project Studio in Borås2 or issue-oriented approaches like trust based governance by task-forces in Ängelholm. 3hese counter measures are seen as a capacity building to regain and reinvent what has been lost during NPM -which is still operational -and to shape organisations that are dynamically more robust in terms of organisational learning and tackling wicked issues in complex situations such as urban planning etc.This is in line with the ultimate objective to both increase skills and enable UN Agenda 2030 as well as safeguard basic public services provision.These boundary spanners are not sufficiently captured in any conventional vertical/ horisontal axis understanding. The shift or, rather, the approaches to tackle these issues in complex municipal development and systemic innovation has been flocking around (explicit, intentional) experimental approaches, many times by approaches similar to urban living labs.In this regard, particularly a growing interest in boundary spanners, congruent with the intermediaries seen as crucial for transformation capacity building (e.g.Wolfram 2018) has been noticeable lately. ",
"section_name": "Jonas Bylund:",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "The most relevant projects that led to MPG frameworks came not from a direct central intervention nore from a pure local initiative. In 2006 a complex center-periphery program, named ELISA, was launched and produced the best results using a simple but effective scheme: the center (a department of Prime Minister's offices entitled about local government) addressed threats and goals, and a combination of regional and local authorities proposed the solutions, gaining the financial instruments to realize its plane, tool and platform (Conti, Vetritto, 2018). The ELISA funding program (Enti Locali -Innovazioni di SistemA, Local Authorities -System Innovation) was introduced in 2006 as an instrument to create a national fund for the investment and the innovation in the local authorities and in its decade of operation, it gave an important contribution to the organizational and technological modernization of the Local Authorities.This attempt can be considered as a precursor with respect to what would later be the prevailing attitude of those European policies which, in view of the challenges of the international economic crisis, responded favoring the local dimension of development.In practice, this has Authorities.The goal is to improve services for users and the efficiency of its internal processes throughout advanced systems of Citizen Relationship Management (CiRM), highly interactive web portals, implementations to support the annual and multiannual programming, solutions for measuring organizational and individual performances, integration and upgrading of labour information systems (at the beginning, even though the labour-related projects were in a stand-alone group, then, during the assessment of the projects, they were absorbed by the quality of services field.).-TAXATION AND CADASTRE: integrated digital management of local services concerning taxation and cadastre through cooperative application models.The aim is to increase the ability of overseeing and monitoring the territory, countering tax evasion and promoting tax equalization.Tax, civil registry services, construction industries: all these fields of application are now the backbone of the organizations that adopted them.Apart from the innovation communities born from the ELISA program, there's only another single MPG scheme that had a great success and that is worth citing, the COMMONWEB platform for civic engagement, services deployment and intercommunal collaboration, enacted without any help or involvement from central authorities by a \"Consorzio\" of all the local authorities of the Trentino Autonomous Province. ",
"section_name": "Giovanni Vetritto:",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Han Brezet: Nowadays, the MPG inspired approach in the Netherlands is not restricted to areas, in which the country performs already good, in the top-3, like measured in the European DESI-index (DESI, 2019).These scores include areas like connectivity, human capital, use of internet services, integration of digital technology and digital public services, all in relation to the Digital Economy and Society. Also the poor sustainable development situation in the Netherlands, with for instance low scoring European positions in the energy transition and nature protection fields, has undergone an MPG impulse in recent years. For instance, the energy transition area has adopted the new élan of co-design and co-makership in 'National Transition Agenda's', in which climate tables of involved stakeholders from all quadruple helix backgrounds have co-formulated future missions and goals of energy efficiency in production and consumption as well as renewable energy contribution.Specific roadmaps are envisaged and developed for each subsector, and the interim-results are promising so far (PBL, 2019a).A similar approach has been chosen for the National Agenda for the Circular Economy (PBL, 2019b).Again, these programs know their bottom-up Jonas Bylund: What we see is less of a programme, but more of 'swarm intelligence' forming around what we might call the necessity of boundary spanners.Similar to the notion of boundary objects, these are actors who works a lot 'in between', they are intermediaries that translate and connect between sectoral approaches, silos, between departments, public private and civil society, etc.This is also in-between the so-called vertical as well as so-called horizontal lines.Since most of any innovation and the challenges in public administration and urban governance faces 'falls between the chairs' nowadays, this figure is identified as at times already working in practice.But also as a resource, capacity, that we arguably need much more of -without having to 'destroy the silos' as we hear a lot in policy circles.Their work effects a kind of institutional thickness or density4 that is required to coordinate quite complex urban developments full of wicked issues. Then, of course, in Sweden, as in many other European settings, we still have a kind of ecological modernisation attitude lingering in these matters.A remnant of 1980s-1990s technocratic approaches to urban sustainability, the ecological modernization approach means that, at times, required systemic transitions are still understood as technological feats to be performed 'under the hood' rather than by co-creation with affected actors and that if anything threatens the comfort of the consumer, 'acceptance' has to be sought.This is of course in stark contrast to the approach in challenge-driven innovation to shape more robust solutions by early-on and transparent co-creation with mult-actor stakeholder groups, for example in urban living lab settings. ",
"section_name": "Paola Clerici Maestosi: Innovation Communities and sustainable/innovative management models: what's going on in your country?",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "All the examples mentioned above give a very clear view on how much can be realized with an effective collaboration among different levels of government even in a country like Italy, that is at the last positions in the European DESI index (European Commission, 2018). A report from the Politecnico of Milan University already showed some years ago that the small size of most local and regional authorities in Italy is not sufficient as economy scale level; and that an effective collaboration is needed to reach the pervasive goal that the new ICT models can assure in terms of administrative modernization (Department for Regional and Local Affairs & Politecnico di Milano -School of Management, 2014). What is still missing in Italy is a systematic and comprehensive and conscious national strategy agreed among different levels of government, from the State down to the local authorities, in all the major fields of innovation. What is happening, instead, is that in a lot of situations there are different arrangements of local, provincial, regional and rarely ministerial authorities to produce single projects and limited efficiency and effectiveness gains (Vetritto, 2017). ",
"section_name": "Giovanni Vetritto:",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Han Brezet: Historically speaking, the larger, strong cities (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht and Eindhoven), together with the region oriented Provinces are the strong players in the intermediary innovation field. Today, in most cities and provinces one will find Creative Councils and Innovation Boards who are (pro-) actively addressing local opportunities with local strengths, but also participating in the Government innovation agenda setting while creating their own programs, with support from the national government.Particularly, during the last ten years, a variety of new regional initiatives successfully have taken of, which align stakeholders from different perspectives and organizations, such as the RDM labs and facilities in the harbour area of Rotterdam, the 'de Waag' maker space in Amsterdam, the AMS (Amsterdam Metropolitan Solutions institute.(AMS, 2018)), a joint venture of MIT Boston, Delft University of Technology and Wageningen Research University, the high-tech campus with Philips and others in Eindhoven and the Water Campus and Alliance in the Province of Fryslan. These local and regional lighthouses, including the Wadden Islands as testbeds for sustainable innovationhave a relevant new role for the development of Dutch innovations.(Brezet, Belmane and Tijsma, 2019). Jonas Bylund: Strained.With a tradition or cultivation of a rather weak regional (county) level for the last 500 years.Although much of sustainability is, from a national government point of view, thought to happen by the regional catalyst, this territorial scale of administration is more of an outline than a substantial driving force in governance (apart from the management and delivery of specific services such as health care and police).This may account for a kind of constant question-mark and even mismatch in general in Sweden towards the logic in the EU around structural funds and programmes aimed at supporting regional development.The municipalities, then, closely guards and covets their almost sovereign mandate to rule/manage land-use issues (again, barring issues of national interest/importance). So, for a country that politically and administratively during large parts of the 20th Century has been managed by strongly consensus-oriented procedures, there is a kind of peculiar local governance individualism and fragmentation that the regional county level cannot always be very effective facilitating and coordinating towards functional regional sustainable development. ",
"section_name": "Paola Clerici Maestosi: Which is the relationship, in your country, between local authorities and central administration?",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "In Italy there has been, especially from the late 90's, a strong preference of political parties and governments for the empowerment of regions and not of local authorities; that preference came from political and tactical reasons and produced a number of limits in territorial polices in Italy; the most important one is the absence of a clear and organic urban strategy (Vetritto 2019). Each region has a sort of limited but strong autonomy in leading reform projects for their local authorities; in a very small country with a high number of regions, in many cases very little, this is definitely a problem (Caporossi 2019). When a strong attempt to reform the juridical basis of all the administrative system of local, provincial and regional authorities, with an important law of April 2014, it produced very limited results, due to a very faint implementation attempt (Vetritto 2016). ",
"section_name": "Giovanni Vetritto:",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Han Brezet: In the Netherlands, the role of European Structural Funds has been particularly strong in the more remote regions, like in the North of the country.Special organizations, overarching more provinces and smaller cities, have been set up, to deal with the ESF in regions.For instance the SNN (Samenwerkende Noord-Nederlandse instellingen) program covers three provinces, a number of regional cities and representatives of the quadruple helix in its board.Compared to a number of years ago, the ESFprograms are modernized, following MPG insights.For instance, the Operational Program North (OP Noord) ",
"section_name": "Paola Clerici Maestosi: In which way European structural Funds contribute to shift from New Public Management to Multilevel Public Governance?",
"section_num": null
}
] |
[
{
"section_content": "This article is a part of the EERA Joint Programme on Smart Cities' Special issue on Tools, technologies and systems integration for the Smart and Sustainable Cities to come (Østergaard and Maestosi 2019) ",
"section_name": "Acknowledgement",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management Vol.24 2019 163-178 DIALOGUE promotes innovation and entrepreneurship in the context of societal -smart RIS-specialisation-challenges like climate change, health, food security, water, energy.It stimulates participative innovation and living labs to establish the region as a test bed for innovation.Compared to the traditional approach of taking winners and sectors as starting point, the North ESF program starts with challenges, \"willers\" and is mission-oriented, following Mazzucato (Mazzucato, 2018).Moreover, a programmatic approach is considered essential compared to the regular project-toproject improvisation, building a systematic knowledge position and helping to strengthen the regional innovation eco-infrastructure.(Brezet, Belmane and Tijsma, 2019.)Jonas Bylund: As just mentioned, in Sweden, the role of European Structural Funds has been a question-mark and even mismatch in general towards transnational programmes aimed at supporting regional development for the first decades of joining the EU.However, the Swedish regions and municipalities are learning how to handle them more and more. Giovanni Vetritto In Italy the contribution of European Structural Funds to the reshaping of the different public administration territorial levels has been very weak. The effective and quick use, in strategically orientated way, of these funds has never been a reality. In the last two septennial periods of European programming Italy has shifted to the last positions on every classification, becoming late on its own standards for the amount of resources spent, for the time of spending, for the effectiveness of results produced (Barca 2011;Barca 2018). In this context, the policies funded with the national operational program on governance were in line with this ineffective trend. Programme Manager, IQ Samällsbyggnad, (SE) Professor Department Design, Engineering, section Design for Sustainability, TU Delft (NL) Head office for Urban policies, institutional modernization and International activity, Department for regional Affairs, Council of Ministries Presidency (IT) ",
"section_name": "DIALOGUE Jonas Bylund",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "International Journal of Sustainable Energy Planning and Management Vol.24 2019 163-178 DIALOGUE promotes innovation and entrepreneurship in the context of societal -smart RIS-specialisation-challenges like climate change, health, food security, water, energy.It stimulates participative innovation and living labs to establish the region as a test bed for innovation.Compared to the traditional approach of taking winners and sectors as starting point, the North ESF program starts with challenges, \"willers\" and is mission-oriented, following Mazzucato (Mazzucato, 2018).Moreover, a programmatic approach is considered essential compared to the regular project-toproject improvisation, building a systematic knowledge position and helping to strengthen the regional innovation eco-infrastructure.(Brezet, Belmane and Tijsma, 2019.)Jonas Bylund: As just mentioned, in Sweden, the role of European Structural Funds has been a question-mark and even mismatch in general towards transnational programmes aimed at supporting regional development for the first decades of joining the EU.However, the Swedish regions and municipalities are learning how to handle them more and more. Giovanni Vetritto In Italy the contribution of European Structural Funds to the reshaping of the different public administration territorial levels has been very weak. The effective and quick use, in strategically orientated way, of these funds has never been a reality. In the last two septennial periods of European programming Italy has shifted to the last positions on every classification, becoming late on its own standards for the amount of resources spent, for the time of spending, for the effectiveness of results produced (Barca 2011;Barca 2018). In this context, the policies funded with the national operational program on governance were in line with this ineffective trend. ",
"section_name": "",
"section_num": ""
},
{
"section_content": "Programme Manager, IQ Samällsbyggnad, (SE) ",
"section_name": "DIALOGUE Jonas Bylund",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Professor Department Design, Engineering, section Design for Sustainability, TU Delft (NL) ",
"section_name": "Han Brezet",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Head office for Urban policies, institutional modernization and International activity, Department for regional Affairs, Council of Ministries Presidency (IT) ",
"section_name": "Giovanni Vetritto",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "",
"section_name": "Paola Clerici Maestosi",
"section_num": null
}
] |
[] |
https://doi.org/10.5278/ijsepm.3327
|
Identification of user requirements for an energy scenario database
|
Energy scenarios assist decision making regarding the transformation of the energy supply system. A multitude of scenarios exists in various formats. Thus, for scientists and policy stakeholders alike, it remains difficult to distinguish and compare scenario data. Hence, the aim of the project SzenarienDB is to establish an energy scenario database containing data in comparable and machine-readable format. SzenarienDB will do so by extending the OpenEnergyPlatform (OEP). To ensure that the extension fulfils the requirements of the modelling community, we conducted an online survey. We asked the participants about what they expected of an energy scenario database. Along with input from expert meetings and GitHub issues on that topic, we derived user requirement from the answers. In total, we identified 69 requirements. Out of these, around 44% were considered as very urgent. Hence, we conclude that there is a great need for the development of a consistent energy scenario database. To tackle the requirements we grouped these into twelve categories: input and output, data review process, bug-fixes, documentation, factsheets, features, functions to modify data, layout, metadata, ontology, references, and other. Each category is resolved according to its intrinsic properties.
|
[
{
"section_content": "The transformation of the energy supply system is complex and the identification of impacts is influenced by the results of scientific reports based on energy scenarios.In general, a scenario is used to express that a future condition or development of a certain aspect is seen as \"possible\" [1].Energy scenarios describe possible future developments in the energy supply system and e.g. may include effects on greenhouse gas emissions.They can aid the identification of optimal or appropriate paths of development and serve as a factual basis for political decision-making [2].There are several kinds of scenarios, from which two types are popular in the field of energy scenarios.These types are called \"forecasting\" and \"backcasting\".The type of \"forecasting\" generates exploratory scenarios that take a look from today into the future.In these types of scenarios, no certain goal or plan is predetermined, where a development shall go.Whereas in \"backcasting\" a target scenario is created with given future conditions, looking for a development that reaches these conditions [1].Nonetheless, the term scenario is not defined and thus may have different implications depending on the person using it.Hence, this leads to less transparency and comparability when working with multiple scenarios. Several studies and energy scenarios are published each year, usually by research institutes on behalf of public authorities, companies or civil society organisations [3] [4].For stakeholders and even the energy modelling community it has become increasingly difficult to compare different scenarios, as methods and objectives usually differ and assumptions may be expressed in different ways [1].Even the reconstruction of a single scenario can be complex or impossible, since assumptions are often not published in full detail [5], thus lacking transparency.Furthermore, the collection and processing of input data for scenarios has become more time consuming and costly.This lack of transparency fosters distrust, but trust in this research does matter because it contributes to policies and strategic decision making on energy, as [6] explicates.Some approaches were made to meet the need for transparency and comparability in the energy system modelling and scenario community.A transparency checklist was developed by [7], to improve the quality and traceability of scenario studies, for example.Other studies focus on the topic of transparency by open access of data and models [8] [9] [10] and data enrichment of those [11]. In our project SzenarienDB, we focus on transparency and comparability of (complex) energy scenarios.The project SzenarienDB aims to create a database for energy scenarios as an extension of the OpenEnergyPlatform (OEP) [12] [13], an open source platform for energy data.Here, scenario data of several studies will be uploaded to the database, freely and easily accessible under an open license.They can serve as a reference and help to establish more transparency and comparability.In addition, it is part of the project to ensure the maintenance of the database even after the project has ended.We assume that easily accessible data from the database via a user-friendly interface will increase accessibility as well as scientific exchange.This will contribute to reducing the necessary effort for model comparisons and sensitivity analyses.Furthermore, the data platform has potential to facilitate scientific and political decision making due to a generally improved level of transparency and comparability.Finally, in the ideal case, the platform will contain the most recent developments in scenario generation and modelling. The development of the OEP was started in the research project open_eGo, by the implementation of an open and community driven energy database.The database is based on a PostgreSQL database that is made available via a web-interface on the OEP [12] [14].The main focus is to exchange and provide open data via an online data portal which could be used by the project partners and across research projects [15].Furthermore, the OEP includes the possibility to version-controlled data sets and assign rich meta data to data sets.An application programming interface (API) allows secure and documented interactions and data exchange.Many python-based tools use SQLAlchemy to communicate with existing databases that also allows the usage of different database interfaces by so-called dialects.In order to ease the use of the OEP the oedialect [12] has been developed to enable the use of SQLAlchemy structures to access the data available on the OEP. In European energy systems research several open source modelling approaches emerged.These include projects like SciGrid [16], oemof [17] , GENESYS [18], open_eGo [12], OPSD [19], PyPSA-Eur [20] and others. In the past, there have been several approaches to distribute open access energy data.In 1991 the project IKARUS [21] set up a free database.Despite a considerable demand the approach failed.This was due to technical and conceptual restrictions such as the distribution of data via hardware and a proprietary database management system.Another open database from the early days is OpenEI [22].OpenEI is based on the CKAN system of the open knowledge foundation.The CKAN system is also used by the Wold Bank database that focuses on developing countries.CKAN is in widespread use, but during the initial assessment of possible frameworks it did not use modern web frameworks such as Flask or Django for the web architecture and was still based on python2 and Pylons.The migration of CKAN to a more modern python3-and Flask-based foundation is currently in progress.To address such shortcomings, the OEP was developed as a Django based open-source application [23].This gives the OEP a flexible foundation which can be extended easily and independently from data specific aspects.Further recent projects include the European Union project OpenENTRANCE which aims to develop, apply and disseminate an open, transparent and integrated modelling platform for target scenarios in 2020, 2030 and 2050.The database itself will be hosted by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) [24]. The past approaches to distribute open access energy data show that it is important to include the user requirements, in order to ensure the success of such a database.Establishing user requirements is a common method to capture the most important ",
"section_name": "Introduction",
"section_num": "1."
},
{
"section_content": "User requirements can be established via different methods, such as interviews, comparison to other systems, user observation at the point of application, and more [25].Our approach for developing user requirements for the energy scenario database is based on an online survey, on expert meetings as well as on GitHub issues.The details of this approach are described in the following. In the course of this study we conducted an online survey among potential users of our database from the energy scenario and modelling community.We chose this method because of its high accessibility to the target group, as well as the relatively modest preconditions regarding time and cost [28] [29].Our main research question was: 'What are the user requirements for an open-source database containing energy scenarios?'.The online survey consisted of two parts.The first part considered the day-to-day work of the target group.The second part focused on features and criteria a scenario database should ideally fulfil from their point of view.A complete list of all questions is available in Appendix Table A1.We invited the target group to take part in the online survey via several channels that focus on energy modelling and scenario topics: We derived user requirements from the online survey's multiple-choice answers and free text comments features, functionality and requirements for a software development project [25].Stakeholders and users have individual requirements for a particular software.User requirements provide the basis for specification sheets that allow meeting these needs.Considering user requirements during the software development stage requires relatively little effort but the effect on the final result is often significant [26].The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [27] defines a requirement as: 1) A condition or capability needed by a user to solve a problem or achieve an objective.2) A condition or capability that must be met or possessed by a system or system component to satisfy a contract, standard, specification, or other formally imposed documents.3) A documented representation of a condition or capability as in ( 1) or ( 2).Therefore, it is necessary to capture the user requirements of the targeted stakeholders in order to develop an energy scenario database that will be accepted and used by the target group. The objectives of the energy scenario database are: • provision of access through an API regardless of the system or programming language • versioning of the data, including old results, correction of errors, addition of scenarios and other • open licences (CC0) for all uploaded scenario data • serving as a role model for similar projects of other disciplines and regions • triggering a broad discussion on standards for the exchange on data, code and description of models and scenarios The novelties of our database compared to existing databases in the energy sector are: • helping to reduce the expenses in energy modelling due to easy access of existing energy scenarios • serving as a central repository of consistent and, as far as possible, complete energy scenario data • fostering the comparability of scenarios and thereby improving the support of policy decisions • creating an ontology with open access in the field of energy modelling In the following are the methods and results described how we generated user requirements for an energy scenario database. stories and other issues were raised by people who don't participate in the project.Moreover, several of these issues described similar problems, as well as problems addressed in the survey.Overlapping issues and requirements were therefore merged together.Furthermore, some issues were very specific while others were very broad.Issues were filtered and aggregated into subsets, preserving the initial intentions, but embedding them into a bigger picture; e.g.requested bug fixes were grouped together, as well as calls for documentation, while some time consuming feature requests, such as a global search function, were discarded.This resulted in 27 cumulative requirements condensed from GitHub. In order to merge these different sources of user requirements, we removed duplicate requirements.We classified each requirement according to the following criteria: • estimated time for completion • urgency • overall estimate • category Time and urgency were assessed roughly, using the T-shirt size estimation method [33].We defined the sizes as follows: S = small/one day/not urgent, M = medium/ one week/somewhat urgent and L = large/one month/ very urgent. The overall estimate rates the importance of a requirement.We jointly rated requirements, following the German school grade system from 1 to 6, with 1 being very important and 6 being insufficient. Finally, requirements were classified into one of twelve categories: input and output, data review process, the participants were able to provide, too.These user requirements were phrased so that they followed the structure of user stories, i.e. \"As <a type of user >, I want <goal>, [so that some reason]\" (<.>required, [.] optional) [30].For example: As a user I would like to use a wizard to upload .csvfiles in order to use the SzenarienDB without any technical precognition.All user requirements had to satisfy the criteria in Table 1 [31] [26]. Another common method used to define user requirements is called the INVEST method [32].The acronym stands for Independent, Negotiable, Valuable to the customers, Estimable, Small and Testable user stories.All of the INVEST criteria but \"Negotiable\" are included in the criteria listed in Table 1.Negotiability is attempted however, by publishing all gathered requirements in the OEP's online repository and by writing this paper to hopefully reach more people who can generate feedback and thereby improve the database. Further user requirements were derived in meetings and web conferences with experts from within the project who discussed one topic at a time.These topics were 'What metadata should be included?','How to reference original data?', 'How to review uploaded data?' and 'Requirements for tutorials of the oedialect'. Finally, the issues on the OEP GitHub repositories were used as another base for user requirements.Since the repositories are constantly changing, we set the cutoff date for consideration to be the 29th of October 2018.We collected 147 issues from GitHub in total.These issues did not satisfy our user requirement criteria mentioned above.In some cases these issues were opened before we could decide on the method of user API.Out of the participants, 26% were willing to implement a port without any preconditions.The majority of participants (52%) require highly resolved scenario data, e.g.hourly time series for one year, spatial resolution in scale of kilometres.Only 19% use data with a low level of detail, such as aggregated values for countries or years. Furthermore, quality of data (52%) is most important to the participants followed by quantity of data (25%) and user friendliness of the platform (23%). The participants were asked to assign different levels of importance to six features.Figure 1 shows the results in decreasing order: 'filter data', 'description of metadata', 'text search', a 'glossary/ontology', 'preview of data' and 'ad-hoc visualization'.The possibility to 'filter data' was selected most often (70%) as being indispensable.The features 'description of the metadata', 'text search', 'glossary/ontology' and 'preview of the data' are seen as indispensable or quite important by the majority of participants.The feature 'ad-hoc visualization' was considered by most participants merely as nice-to-have (60%).Only very few participants selected that a feature was a waste (≤7%) or I don't know (<4%). The preferred formats for uploads and downloads on such a database were interrogated.The participants had the possibility to choose multiple formats.They predominantly favored .csv,.xlsx,API and table.We further prompted the participants to prioritise different criteria into ranked classes from 1 to 6 (Figure 2).A 'list of references for all datasets' was most often (56%) selected bug-fixes, documentation, factsheets, features, functions to modify data, layout, metadata, ontology, references and other (further explanation in section 3.3).Categorisation was implemented in order make sure that all different kinds of requirements are addressed.A categorisation also facilitates the distribution of tasks with different capabilities in the working team.The final requirements with the corresponding estimated time, urgency, overall estimate and category served as input for the specification sheet. ",
"section_name": "Methods to generate user requirements",
"section_num": "2."
},
{
"section_content": "The results and discussion are presented together in this chapter, starting with the online survey in section 3.1.It is followed by the evaluation of the specification sheet in section 3.2 and concludes with a description on how the requirements of the specification sheets built the energy scenario extension of the OEP in section 3.3. ",
"section_name": "Results and discussion",
"section_num": "3."
},
{
"section_content": "The online survey was started by 177 participants and fully completed by 101 participants.The following numbers all refer to those participants who completed the questionnaire.We received the first response on 12th of June 2018 and closed the survey on 27th of August 2018.About 90% of the responses were given between 13th of June and 10th of July.Most participants work in research institutes (71%) and are involved in scenario generation as well as in making use of scenarios created by others (69%).Only 6 participants do not work with energy scenarios at all.About 56% frequently use external databases, such as Eurostat, OpenStreetMap and others.Only 11% do not use databases at all. The survey revealed a large interest in the topic, especially by the scientific energy modelling community.Participants stated that they are willing to use energy scenarios from an energy scenario database like the OEP (96%) and also to publish their own scenarios there (92%).However, a precondition for publishing scenarios for many participants (41%) is financing.Obstacles in contributing to such a database lie in the difficulty to provide open-source licensing of data or in the commercial nature of scenarios.The participants were asked about their willingness to implement an interface between OEP and their models.The majority (53%) was willing to do so under certain conditions.In the free text these conditions included for example: simple and intuitive API and little effort for the implementation of the the online survey.From the participants 36% selected all six possible answers, and 24% and 23% selected five and four answers out of six, respectively.This shows that not a single answer explains the term 'scenario' and it is hard to find a consistent definition within the community.Hence, we derived that the energy scenario database has to offer the possibility to include data for all of the six answers above and arbitrary permutations of a subset.This definition is especially helpful for the ontology which ensures that everyone is using the same terminology and hence fosters transparency and comparability. ",
"section_name": "Analysis of the online survey",
"section_num": "3.1."
},
{
"section_content": "In total, 69 user requirements were derived from the online survey, expert discussions and OEP GitHub issues.These requirements create the specification sheet.We examined and compared the requirements according to the methods in section [methods].We found that the requirements do not compete with one another.The only requirement which has an overlap is Create a discussion space for tables and schemas.It does not compete with another requirement but with the openmod Wiki [34] and openmod forum [35] .Despite this slight overlap in topic, a discussion forum for tables and schemas is very specific and is not covered by the openmod Wiki and openmod forum, which is why we kept this requirement.However, such a forum may have topics and discussion similar or duplicates to those of the openmod Wiki and openmod forum.Moreover, in our analysis we did not accept fifteen requirements because • the functionality of the issue is already implemented.E.g.As a user I want the name of the homepage to be displayed high up on google (1)(2)(3)(4)(5), so that I don't confuse the homepage and don't have problems finding it.• the functionality of the issue was ranked unimportant or requested by only one person of the online survey, and posed huge implementation/ conceptual work which was disproportionate to the importance of the functionality.E.g.As a user I would like to work with multidimensional tables (like Eurostat) to assign complex values.The evaluation of the specification sheet showed that 44% of the user requirements were considered very urgent and 26% as not urgent.This implies that there is a great need for a scenario database and its specific requirements.The estimation of urgency is furthermore to have the highest priority (class 1).Furthermore, 24% found 'quality check of new scenario data by database crew' to have the highest priority, about 40% see it the second highest class 2. The criteria 'easy and intuitive upload of your own scenarios' and 'speed' have a similar distribution.For these two criteria the participants selected most often a class 3 to 4 (between 19-34%) and less often a class with high or low priority.The criteria of least importance are the 'possibility of processing data directly in the database' and 'unit conversion in the database' (27% and 33% in class 6 respectively). The expert meetings revealed that the term 'scenario' may be understood quite differently, hence a question was included in the online survey to find out what the participants understood by 'scenario'.A list of possible scenario elements was suggested, where the participants could choose multiple answers.The possible answers were: 'general framing parameters and assumptions (e.g.geographical and temporal scope, ...)', 'scenario type (e.g.extreme scenario, objective scenario, ...)', 'model input data', 'justification/explanation on assumption', 'modelling parameters', 'model output data' and 'other [free text field]'.All of the above answers apart from 'other' were selected with similar shares (around one sixth each) but the distribution between the different answers varied depending on the participant answering Figure 4 shows a schematic overview on the work flow of users interacting with the OEP.The work flow is as follows: an energy scenario developer or modeller generates e.g.scenario data, which is uploaded into the OEP (tile: data) and correct metadata is supplied (tile: metadata).The developer or modeller also completes the factsheets (tile: factsheets) which are distinguished into model factsheets and scenario factsheets.The model factsheets contain information on how the model works and the scenario factsheets contain information on how the scenario is characterised.The factsheets and the metadata are coupled to the ontology (tile: ontology) which ensures that the same terminology is used throughout the OEP.The uploaded scenario may now be downloaded (category: input/output) by other energy modellers.This enables them to use the data for their own modelling exercises.Furthermore, users may participate in the reviewing process for data, which is designed to allow for peer review. 'Inputs and output' are managed via an API which is programmed in python.This allows that users only need to invest in establishing a routine on how to interact with the OEP once and can then easily use this routine repeatedly.Since not all users indicated that they would like to use an API, we identified the need for an up-and download wizard as one of the major requirements in our specification sheet.The use of the wizard shall be intuitive while using the API might be more challenging for first time users.Hence, to fulfil the category documentation written tutorials which are presented in Jupyter Notebooks will be provided along with video tutorials on helpful in the upcoming project management.Very urgent issues can be worked off first.For the implementation of all user requirements, we roughly estimate 24 months, originating from 16 user requirements with the duration of one month, 27 of one week and 25 of one day.Hence, together with the urgency this gives very fast improvement possibilities: to first work off the issues with short time estimation and high urgency. Most user requirements (20%) fall into the category input and output, i.e. upload and download of data, and in the category feature (20%) (Figure 3).Third most frequent category is metadata (16%), followed by OEP layout (12%), functions to modify the dataset (9%), documentation wanted (9%) and others which are below 5%. Interestingly, the user requirements, while explicitly meant to reflect on energy scenario needs, did not end up being very specific for the energy scenario domain.Most requirements would be the same for e.g. a water quality database.Generally, the compiled requirements should hold true for any database that stores modelling input and output data and may contain georeferenced and temporal data.Therefore, an established energy scenario database may be of interest for other disciplines as well.Our chosen approach is thus transferable to other disciplines of research, too. All user requierements can be accessed at GitHub at https://github.com/OpenEnergyPlatformwith the tag 'specification sheet'.possibility to create a standardised language for a domain of interest: it is a system of concepts including the descriptions of how these concepts relate to one another.The ontology created for the OEP harmonises and defines terms and concepts used throughout the OEP, for example in factsheets and the metadata.In the course of the SzenarienDB project, the current ontology on the OEP is extended by terminology specific to energy scenarios.This includes information needed for target scenarios, temporal and regional concepts, sector concepts, modelling assumptions and constraints. The user can also upload input data and in that case set 'references' to individual data tables and cells.These references can be used to include the uploaded data in Linked Open Data schemes (LOD) and make them more accessible to potential users and allow the integration of other sources, e.g. by concepts defined in the ontology. The requested 'features' (category: features) for the energy scenario extension of the OEP are of different kinds, but many refer to preview functionality such as the requirement: As a user, I would like to use the preview function to display data, for example as a table, in order to be able to evaluate the content of the scenarios. The 'data review' process is planned to include a badge system like bronze, silver and gold.Other users of the OEP, besides the person contributing a dataset, may rank the dataset and comment on missing or questionable entries.This will ensure that on the one hand the datasets are complete (including metadata, references, licences etc.) and on the other hand that the uploaded the details of the API and also the upload/download wizard.Documentation in form of tutorials will also be provided for all other important features of the OEP. How the data is displayed in the OEP provides the user with several 'functions to modify the data' such as filtering data.These functions are all in separate GitHub issues due to their independence of each other.These function will ensure an easy usability of the data.These changes are often supported by layout changes (category: layout) to enhance usability. The current 'metadata' format implemented in the OEP will be extended by a standardised, energy scenario specific metadata string.This string includes a human readable description, as well as machine readable name, spatial and temporal context, references to sources and licenses, a list of contributors, a detailed description of the data structure, information on conducted data reviews and additional metadata keys that help to evaluate, compare and contextualise any uploaded dataset. The OEP 'factsheets' are a standardised collection and presentation of information about modelling frameworks, models and scenarios used in climate and energy system modelling.The use of interactive fields and pre-defined responses is designed to make it easy to add new factsheets and to filter for existing entries.The goal is to create a full set of linked factsheets (and datasets) to improve transparency.The current focus is on extending the scenario factsheets to the heterogeneous landscape of different energy scenarios and to link the information in the ontology.An 'ontology' provides the The geographic scope of the OEP is currently Germany.Thus the target group for the survey had to originate from there.Since the German energy system modelling community is relatively small, in turn was the sample size.Once the OEPs focus becomes more international, future surveys can be conducted; based on larger samples sizes.We assume that scientists in this research field will have similar user requirements on such databases, no matter where in the world they conduct their research. Further limitations are given by the duration of the project.User requirements had to be selected so that they can all be worked of within the duration of the project. Hence scenario data is correct and fulfils a scientific standard.The reviewers will be encouraged to participate by a ranking system of their profile similar to stack overflow.The more reviews they have done the more e.g.stars they get.The review functionality shall also include a commenting function, where comments can be up-voted or down-voted.The final two categories are 'bug-fixes' and 'other'.Bugs unfortunately always occur in a software development project, and have to be fixed.These can be of very different kind.Either misspelled text on the web-page, links which are not working or features which are broken etc. The last category is 'other' which contains all requirements which could not be included in the other eleven categories.This includes for example the requirement As a user, I want to access old versions of data if I accidentally entered something wrong.These requirements will be tended to one by one. ",
"section_name": "Specification sheet evaluation",
"section_num": "3.2."
},
{
"section_content": "Our main research question was: 'What are the user requirements for an open source database containing energy scenarios?'.We addressed this by an onlinesurvey as well as by expert meetings and GitHub issues.Our main findings were: • The modelling community has a high interest in an energy scenario database. ",
"section_name": "Conclusion",
"section_num": "4."
},
{
"section_content": "They are willing to upload their energy scenarios and use energy scenarios of others.• More than 50% of the participants would use an API for upload and download, with .csvbeing the preferred download format. ",
"section_name": "•",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "The two most important features were 'filtering of data' and 'description of metadata'. ",
"section_name": "•",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "The two most important ranked criteria were 'references for all datasets' and 'quality check of uploaded data'. ",
"section_name": "•",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Of the requirements, around 40% were rated as very urgent showing the great need for an energy scenario database.In the further development of the OpenEnergyPlatform these findings are addressed in realising the user requirements.To aggregate the 69 user requirements they have been clustered into twelve categories: input and output, data review process, bug-fixes, documentation, factsheets, features, functions to modify data, layout, metadata, ontology, references and other.Hence, these ",
"section_name": "•",
"section_num": null
}
] |
[
{
"section_content": "This research has been funded by the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy of Germany as part of the project SzenarienDB (03ET4057A-D). ",
"section_name": "Acknowledgements",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Would it be an option for you to provide your own scenarios for \"SzenarienDB\"? • Yes, I would provide my own scenarios and publish all assumptions, as far as possible.• Yes, in case this is part of my project and will be financed. • No, this is not an option because of the license. • No, this is not an option for me because of other reasons, which are ... Would it be an option for you to include a database like \"SzenarienDB\" in your workflow by using scenarios from it? • Yes, sounds good. • No, using scenarios from \"SzenarienDB\" is not an option for me, because ... Would it be an option for you to have a port implemented/ implement a port by yourself between your models and \"SzenarienDB\", which enables an easy access for further usage? • Definitely. • Yes, in case of... ",
"section_name": "Appendix: List of questions of the online survey",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "",
"section_name": "Appendix: List of questions of the online survey",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Would it be an option for you to provide your own scenarios for \"SzenarienDB\"? • Yes, I would provide my own scenarios and publish all assumptions, as far as possible.• Yes, in case this is part of my project and will be financed. • No, this is not an option because of the license. • No, this is not an option for me because of other reasons, which are ... ",
"section_name": "4",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Would it be an option for you to include a database like \"SzenarienDB\" in your workflow by using scenarios from it? • Yes, sounds good. • No, using scenarios from \"SzenarienDB\" is not an option for me, because ... ",
"section_name": "5",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Would it be an option for you to have a port implemented/ implement a port by yourself between your models and \"SzenarienDB\", which enables an easy access for further usage? • Definitely. • Yes, in case of... ",
"section_name": "6",
"section_num": null
}
] |
[
"a Fraunhofer Institute for Energy Economics and Energy System Technology (IEE), Königstor 59, 34119 Kassel, Germany"
] |
https://doi.org/10.5278/ijsepm.3328
|
Interconnection of the electricity and heating sectors to support the energy transition in cities
|
The electricity, heating, and transport sectors in urban areas all have to contribute to meeting stringent climate targets. Cities will face a transition from fossil fuels to renewable sources, with electricity acting as a cross-sectorial energy carrier. Consequently, the electricity demand of cities is expected to rise, in a situation that will be exacerbated by ongoing urbanisation and city growth. As alternative to an expansion of the connection capacity to the national grid, local measures can be considered within city planning in order to utilize decentralised electricity generation, synergies between the heating and electricity sectors, and flexibility through energy storage technologies. This work proposes an optimisation model that interconnects the electricity, heat, and transport sectors in cities. We analyse the investments in and operation of an urban energy system, using the City of Gothenburg as an example. We find that the availability of electricity from local solar PV together with thermal storage technologies increase the value of using power-to-heat technologies, such as heat pumps. High biomass prices together with strict climate targets enhance the importance of electricity in the district heating sector. A detailed understanding of the integration of local low-carbon energy technologies can give urban planners and other city stakeholders the opportunity to take an active role in the city's energy transition.
|
[
{
"section_content": "The development and planning of cities in the 21 st century face a number of challenges.Concomitant with managing continuous growth and urbanisation [1], cities must implement policies to meet climate targets and mitigate carbon emissions [2].Energy planning in cities has to include and integrate efficiently the different sectors for electricity, mobility, heating and cooling, into what is often called \"smart cities\" [3,4].Increased electrification is seen as one corner-stone of this development.New electricity loads, together with an increased population density, are likely to increase the annual and peak electricity demands of cities.As a consequence, several cities have identified an urgent need to increase the connection capacity from the national electricity grid.Investments in new capacity are often associated with long lead-times.An alternative, which is the focus of the present work, is to increase reliance on local electricity and heat generation, in combination with the utilisation of flexibility by storage technologies. Sectorial couplings and electrification have, on larger geographical scales, been identified as important components of a fossil-free energy system [5,6].How such couplings play out on a limited urban scale remains to be analysed in detail.The different parts of city energy systems are represented in the literature by, for example, the integration of a large share of renewables into the urban energy system [7][8][9][10], the integration of electric vehicle charging [11][12][13], the operation of urban district heating in the modelling.Section 5 presents the conclusions drawn and reflections as to further developments to the proposed model. ",
"section_name": "Introduction",
"section_num": "1."
},
{
"section_content": "This work represents a part of the development of a linear energy system optimization model for cities, which includes investments as well as the dispatch of energy technologies with hourly time resolution, herein applied to the city of Gothenburg, Sweden.Figure 1 presents the different modules of the city optimization model.The objective of the model is to minimize the total operational and investment costs in the electricity and heating sectors, while complying with a constraint on CO 2 emissions.A full description of the model used in this study is provided online in the Appendix A. In the model, the hourly electricity load profile can be met by a combination of electricity that is imported from the national electricity grid to the city, electricity that is generated within the city borders and electricity that is discharged from an electricity storage.The amount of electricity that can be imported is limited by the import capacity.To focus the analysis on the effect of local generation and storage technologies on system design and operation, no export from the city energy system to the national grid is considered in the current version of the model.The hourly district heating demand cannot be met by heat delivered from outside of the city but has to rely on local heat production within the urban district heating system or the heat discharged from thermal storage units. The electricity and district heating demand profiles are used as inputs to the model, together with a systems [14][15][16][17], and sector-overlapping analyses [18][19][20][21].Previous studies have provided valuable insights into low-carbon scenarios in different parts of the city energy system.The present work adds to this body of knowledge by including options for investments and dispatch of technology in relation to both the electricity and heating systems, as part of the techno-economic optimisation modelling.We model future, zero CO 2 -emission energy systems in growing cities, with the focus on the interconnections between the electricity and heating sectors, while considering a fixed limit on hourly electricity import from the national grid. This paper presents and applies a linear urban energy system optimisation model and analyses: • The potential role of local energy balancing, i.e. local electricity and heat generation, together with electricity and thermal storage technologies; and • Investments in and the composition of urban electricity and district heating systems, directed towards meeting stringent CO 2 emission targets.The model is applied using the city of Gothenburg as a case study.Similar to other cities, for example Copenhagen [22], the city of Gothenburg has formulated strategies to reduce its climate impact, by aiming to e.g.phase out fossil fuels in the district heating system, produce 500 GWh of renewable electricity and reduce CO 2 emissions from road transport by 80% as compared to 2010, all by 2030 [23]. The paper is organised as follows.Section 2 describes the flexibility potential of sectorial coupling in an urban energy system and the method developed.Section 3 gives the results from the modelling of an example city.Section 4 presents a discussion of the assumptions made ",
"section_name": "Method",
"section_num": "2."
},
{
"section_content": "The North European Energy Perspectives (NEPP), a multidisciplinary project focusing on the development of local and national North European energy systems is funded by partners including energy companies, industry and the Swedish Energy Agency.Local access of power has become a major challenge in parts of Sweden.Urbanisation, new construction and the transition from fossil fuel to electricity leads to growing electricity demand in cities.Part of the solution will be increased interaction between sectors and local production units, but many questions for city planning remain.The model developed in this research provides an important tool to analyse the interconnection between the electricity, heat and transport sectors.The model and analysis of design and operation of a city´s energy system is crucial for local strategic planning and the possibility to reach climate targets.The stakeholders in NEPP will benefit from the result of the research. Kjerstin Ludvig, Project management NEPP Thermal storage: Tank storage, pit storage, borehole storage.Details of the current heat and power system and the costs and technical assumptions associated with the investments options are given online in Appendix B. The electric vehicle and public transport modules of the optimisation model, shown in grey in Figure 1, are not part of the results presented in this work, which focuses on the interconnections between the electricity and heating sectors, including the use of heat and electricity storage description of the existing electricity and heat generation units presently available in the City of Gothenburg.Thus, new investments in heat generation and storage technologies are made by the model for replacing fossil-fuelled technologies and to cover the increased demand for heat.New electricity generation and storage capacity are invested in when competitive compared to importing electricity from the national grid or if the import capacity cannot meet demand in the city.The model minimises the total cost to supply electricity and heating demand for 1 year, i.e., the investment and operational costs for electricity, heating, and storage technologies with a constraint on CO 2 emissions. The modelling includes the following technology options: • Electricity generation: Solar PV technologies, peak power gas turbines fired by natural gas or biogas.and the common assumptions made to represent its future development, i.e., assumptions that remain the same in all the modelled cases.Thus, in the modelled cases Gothenburg is assumed to have increased electricity and heat demand by a factor of 1.5.Yet, in the model the connection capacity from the national grid to the city is limited to present day levels.This means that in modelled future cases the connection capacity limit corresponds to 55% of the maximum winter electricity load; and that there is sufficient connection capacity to cover all load by imported electricity during about 4 000 hours per year.In short, we model increasing demand in a city that is assumed to grow in size and population, however, without any possibility of new investments in connection capacity to the national grid.With these assumptions, we investigate the roles of local generation and flexibility in the city energy system. For the case study of the city of Gothenburg we investigate two base modelling cases and three additional modelling cases in a sensitivity analysis.The cases differ in terms of the cost assumptions for biomass (and biogas), PV, and batteries, as presented in Table 2.The Low Cost Bio case is intended to reflect the cost assumptions for a near-term future, while the Low Cost PV case should represent a longer-term future, with greater competition for biomass.The trajectories of the PV and battery investment costs and biomass prices are uncertain.To specify units.The synergies between electric vehicle charging and discharging and the city electricity and heating sectors will be investigated in a future study. ",
"section_name": "Acknowledgement of value",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Figure 2a shows the hourly profiles of electricity and heat demand for the City of Gothenburg, used as inputs to the model.It is clear that there are pronounced seasonal variations, as well as variations on the weekly, diurnal and hourly levels.The model applies the above mentioned technology options to supply the district heat demand and electricity for the city demand.Heat generation technologies include electricity-dependent options, such as heat pumps.In addition, the model includes storage options for both heat (within the district heating system) and electricity (battery technologies).Thus, the model can evaluate the potential for flexibility and the linkages between electricity and district heating.The hourly electricity price, as utilized for electricity imported to the city energy system in the modelling is presented in Figure 2b, with details on input data given in the Appendix online. ",
"section_name": "Flexibility and synergies in the electricity and district heating sector",
"section_num": "2.1."
},
{
"section_content": "Table 1 provides a summary of the input data that describe the energy system for the City of Gothenburg fuels, and investments in solar PV, biogas turbines, electric HOB capacities and electricity and thermal storage units.Lower total capacity is required, because storage systems enable a more flexible utilization of the installed capacities and smoothening of the loads.Figure 3 shows the dispatch of the generation and storage portfolio over a whole year for the Low Cost Bio case.It is evident that peak technologies, i.e. biogas-fired gas turbines for electricity and HOBs for heat, are used during the winter months.CHP fired by biomass is, however, operated also in the summer months, albeit at a reduced output.This is despite lower electricity and heat demands and higher level of electricity generation from solar PV during the summer months.The operation of the biomass CHP generation over different periods in the summer correlates well with the amount of thermal energy stored in the pit storage.In other words, a higher level of generation from CHP during the summer often increases the storage level in the pit storage.The waste heat production from industry is relatively constant over the influences of technology and fuel cost assumptions in future years, we chose to assume the same level of city growth and a zero CO 2 emission target for all the cases.For each case, the optimisation modelling is run separately, and the results are compared in the analysis.A discount rate of 5% has been assumed for all model runs. ",
"section_name": "Cases and input assumptions",
"section_num": "2.2."
},
{
"section_content": "",
"section_name": "Results",
"section_num": "3."
},
{
"section_content": "Owing to the constraints imposed on emissions from fossil fuel-fired technologies, the model phases-out approximately 300 MW of CHP capacity and 570 MW of HOB capacity, currently run on fossil fuels, mainly natural gas.In neither the Low Cost Bio case nor the Low Cost PV case, phased-out capacity is replaced with the same amount of CHP and HOB capacity compared to present levels.The future technology mix consists of less CHP and HOB capacities that are run on biomass As of Year 2019, this considers the fuels used to run these processes and whether they are in line with the emissions constraint ",
"section_name": "Development of the city district heating and electricity sector",
"section_num": "3.1."
},
{
"section_content": "Demand growth Both, the electricity and heat demand are assumed to increase by a factor of 1.5 Emissions targets Zero emissions (not considering the emissions related to the electricity imported from the national grid) Electricity price for imported electricity Hourly price curve, as taken from the results of a Northern European dispatch model (for a future with an increased share of electricity generation from variable renewables) [24] Interconnection of the electricity and heating sectors to support the energy transition in cities Figure 3: Dispatches of the different technologies for an entire year in the Low Cost Bio case, as obtained from the modelling.For electricity generation technologies, the electricity output is plotted, whereas for heat production technologies, the heat output is plotted.The powerto-heat ratios of 0.3 for biomass and 1.6 for biogas CHP plants explain the corresponding heat production levels from the CHP units. Observe that the scale for PV generation differs from the one in Figure 4, for better readability day) and pit storage.The time between charging and discharging of the tank storage units here varies from several hours up to several days. ",
"section_name": "Common assumptions for all cases:",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "The Higher Cost PV case, obviously, leads to a lower PV capacity compared to the Low Cost PV case, although it is still clearly higher than in the Low Cost Bio case.The 721 MW of PV capacity (almost 80% of the summer peak electricity load) that results from investment in the Higher Cost PV case is sufficient to avoid having to use wood chips CHP during the summer (biomass is an expensive fuel in both the Low Cost PV and the Higher Costs PV cases).Applying an assumption of a higher battery price of 300 €/kWh (as opposed to the 150 €/kWh price used in the base cases) exerts a weak impact on the results.Yet, the availability of cheaper batteries (at 70 €/kWh) in the Low Cost PV, Low Cost Battery case increases investments in PV and battery capacities, while reducing investment in biogas-fired peak units and heat pumps. ",
"section_name": "Sensitivity analysis: Impact of PV and battery prices",
"section_num": "3.3."
},
{
"section_content": "In this work, a simplified growth factor of 1.5 for both the electricity and heat sectors in the city energy system has been applied to all the cases modelled.Yet, the development of future electricity and heating loads is highly uncertain.Energy efficiency measures on the electricity or heating side, the implementation of demand-side management and the utilisation of the building shell for thermal storage could influence the shapes of the demand profiles for electricity and heating.Considering any of the above measures in the analysis could flatten some of the demand peaks and thereby reduce the utilization of batteries and tank storage units, as compared to the results presented in this work.The magnitude of demand growth in the city's electricity and heating sectors over the upcoming decades depends largely on how the city continues to grow.New construction projects in cities often include low-energy buildings.At the same time, new, large-scale consumers (such as those arising from the electrification of industrial or manufacturing sites) could emerge. The availability of sustainably harvested biomass in future scenarios and the assumed costs for this fuel are highly uncertain.Larger competition for biomass can be expected in future energy systems, raising the question the summer months.We have also found that CHP generation is reduced during hours of low electricity prices when more electricity is imported into the city and heat pumps and electric boilers are used to provide heat.The possibility to utilise thermal pit storage to supply heat during periods of highest heat demand can be assumed to dampen HOB investment and generation in this modelled case. Figure 4 shows the dispatch of the different technologies for the Low Cost PV case.The biggest differences in relation to the Low Cost Bio case are the much larger investments in solar PV (due to the lower PV investment costs), as well as the investment in additional thermal storage capacity.The excess electricity from PV is stored either in batteries or as heat, mostly in long term pit storage.Thus, thermal pit storage with heat pumps is utilised as seasonal storage, as shown in Figure 4, whereby the storage level is at its lowest in the middle of April and peaks during September.It is also evident that biomass CHP is utilised to a lesser extent, especially during the summer months when CHP is not in operation.The large PV capacity, together with electricity imports and storage options are sufficient to supply the summer electricity load.The utilisation of heat pumps in the Low Cost PV case is more related to the PV generation profile than to the electricity price.It should be kept in mind that in the cases modelled, export of excess electricity from local generation in the city is not possible.Thus, heat pumps, especially during summer, are run to make use of PV-generated electricity, supply the heat load, and charge the thermal storage.Moreover, as a consequence of the high level of generation from PV, there are many more hours without electricity imports (especially in the day-time) in the Low Cost PV case, as compared to the Low Cost Bio case. ",
"section_name": "Discussion",
"section_num": "4."
},
{
"section_content": "The Low Cost PV case, which combines lower PV costs with higher prices for biomass, shows a clear relationship between the electricity and heating sectors.Especially during summer, electricity is utilised for heat production, which is then combined with thermal seasonal storage.Pit storage systems with heat pumps have low constant losses and are therefore suitable for long-term storage.Tank storage in the Low Cost PV case takes on a role somewhat intermediate, in terms of storage duration, compared to the roles of battery storage (which stores electricity for usually not longer than a Interconnection of the electricity and heating sectors to support the energy transition in cities Figure 4: Dispatches of the different technologies for an entire year in the Low Cost PV case, as obtained from the modelling.For electricity generation technologies, the electricity output is plotted, whereas for heat production technologies, the heat output is plotted.The power-toheat ratios of 0.3 for biomass and 1.6 for biogas CHP plants explain the corresponding heat production levels from the CHP units city's electricity system, but also with respect to providing heat through power-to-heat technologies.This is especially the case when there is a high cost for biomass.Thermal and electricity storage systems that shift energy over hours, days or even seasons become an important part of the city's energy system mix in all the cases investigated, especially when electricity from solar PV is available in abundance.Future work will present an in-depth analysis of the impacts of electric vehicle charging and vehicle to grid discharging on the investments in and operation of electricity and heating technologies.Scenarios that involve other energy carriers, such as hydrogen could also be investigated.Public transport, in the form of busses run on electricity, hydrogen or biogas, can enrich the description of the transport sector in the urban energy system model.whether the urban energy system is the best option to utilize this scarce resource in, or whether there are other sectors or other regions in the world with less alternatives to biomass that should be prioritized. The sectoral integration in the city energy system involves the collaboration of a number of actors and stakeholders that traditionally did not develop common strategies.One aspect that can facilitate installation and operation of local energy technologies are local prices for electricity and heat.In a city where electricity import capacity is at its limits (as with the assumptions in the case study modelled) there should be an increased value of local generation of electricity to the urban energy system.If this value is also seen by local actors, through e.g.local prices or local markets for energy, an incentive is created for local energy generation and storage.Another option to foster a common organization of the city energy transition is the formulation of energy and climate goals and regulations imposed on urban actors to meet these.With an increased interest of private actors, like household customers, in owning small-scale generation and storage units parts of the investment in local technologies could be driven by small-scale actors.The EU's \"The clean energy for all Europeans package\" [25] enables active energy citizens and communities to be part of energy markets and thereby support the energy transition. ",
"section_name": "Synergies between the urban electricity and heat sectors",
"section_num": "3.2."
},
{
"section_content": "Local integration of the electricity and heating sectors in the city energy system presents, to some extent, a viable alternative to expansion of the connection capacity to the national grid for growing cities.Thus, local balancing can make it possible for local stakeholders to address the issues of increasing energy/capacity demand and carbon-neutral energy supply and at the same time avoid costs and long lead times associated with new power lines and transformer stations.This work, which is based on a model developed to analyse the operation of integrated electricity and heating sectors in a smart city, evaluates two main cases with price assumptions on solar PV and biomass fuels using the City of Gothenburg as an example: a) A near-term future case, including low biomass fuel prices and higher PV investment costs, and b) a more-distant future case with higher biomass price and lower PV investment cost. The results show that low-cost electricity within the city (here in the form of PV, assuming a further decrease in investment costs) is not only valuable in terms of the ",
"section_name": "Conclusions and further work",
"section_num": "5."
}
] |
[
{
"section_content": "This article was invited and accepted for publication in the EERA Joint Programme on Smart Cities' Special issue on Tools, technologies and systems integration for the Smart and Sustainable Cities to come [26]. Details on the mathematical model formulation and important input data is found online under http://dx.doi.org/10.5278/ijsepm.3328 ",
"section_name": "Acknowledgements:",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "This article was invited and accepted for publication in the EERA Joint Programme on Smart Cities' Special issue on Tools, technologies and systems integration for the Smart and Sustainable Cities to come [26]. ",
"section_name": "Acknowledgements:",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Details on the mathematical model formulation and important input data is found online under http://dx.doi.org/10.5278/ijsepm.3328 ",
"section_name": "Appendix/Supplementary material:",
"section_num": null
}
] |
[
"Department of Space, Earth and Environment, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden"
] |
null |
Power accessibility, fossil fuel and the exploitation of small hydropower technology in sub-saharan Africa
|
This study overviews the power status, salient barriers to adequate power access and the role of small hydropower in improving power accessibility in the region. The study notes that -over 50% of the population in 41 countries in the region have no access to electricity; the prediction of electricity access growth rate in SSA from 43% in 2016 to 59% in 2030; about 607 people, which is 90% of world's population without access to electricity in 2030 will leave in the region and the rural areas access is below 20%; over 90% of the households in about 25 countries of SSA rely on waste, wood, and charcoal for cooking; the average grid power tariff in SSA is US$0.13 per kWh as against the range of US$0.04 to US$0.08 per kWh grid power tariffs in most parts of the developing world. Also, it was found that the sections of power supply system -generation, transmission and distribution facilities are affected by insufficient funding, poor maintenance and management and over dependence on foreign power supply technologies; and the region is endowed with huge SHP resource that is insignificantly tapped. Lack of workable SHP development framework; insufficient fund; effect of the electricity market in the region; lack of effective synergy among the stakeholders; insufficient and outdated hydrological information about SHP resources; inadequate human and manufacturing facility development were the identified factors responsible for SHP underdevelopment. Domestic development of SHP technology is required to effectively develop SHP to improve access to power in the region. This will require massive human capacity building and the use of locally soured materials and production facilities.
|
[
{
"section_content": "Energy poverty poses a serious obstacle to the socioeconomic development of sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).The power situation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is in a pathetic state despite several intervention measures [1].The challenges that trail the power sector in the region seem as fresh as they were two decades ago and even deepened in some areas.The level of energy inadequacy in the region negates the longstanding efforts to change the narrative.Truly, this is heart breaking considering the resources and efforts that have been expended.The electricity access rates of most countries in the region are about 20% and twothird of the population lack access to modern energy services.The population without access to electricity by region, is shown in Fig 1 .The electricity demanded by the region, from 2000 to 2012, increased by 35% to reach 352 TWh and an average rate of 4% annual electricity demand increase is expected through 2040.In 2017, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that [2]: electricity access rate in SSA will grow from 43% in 2016 to 59% in 2030; and about 607 people, which is 90% of world's population without access to electricity in 2030 will leave in the region. The residential sector average annual electricity consumption is about 488 kWh per capita, which equals only about 5% of the United States consumption [3].Additional information about electricity in SSA are as follows: The region shares 13% of the world's population but accounts for only 4% of the world's energy demands. The total grid-connected power generation capacity in 48 countries in SSA is about 83 GW with South Africa accounting for 50%, generated mostly from coal [4]. Only 13 countries in SSA have power systems capacities over 1 GW.These account for over 80% of the power capacity in SSA.While 27 countries have their grid-connected power systems less than 500 MW, 14 countries are below 100 MW [5]. The installed capacity in SSA is 44 MW per a million people [5]. The wide range of electricity generating sources in SSA include [2]; Renewable energies contribute (hydropower-22%, solar-1% and others, such as biomass, geothermal and wind -3%); Fossil fuel (natural gas-15%, diesel/heavy fuel-23%, and coal-35%) and Nuclear energy contributes 1%.Power infrastructural development in emerging economies attracts international investments, supports and aids because of the dominant role access to electricity plays in the socioeconomic development of a country or region.Sadly, these interventions and supports are yet to give the expected results in some regions especially in the Southern India and SSA.Several research, review and opinion articles have been published on this and how energy can be provided to meet the demands [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].These papers are often similar and at times with different approach for different countries and regions.Hence, this study will examine power access, to identify issues bordering on power access, the deployment of fossil fuel in SSA and their health consequences.The economic significance of the exploitation of small hydropower (SHP) in SSA and the various ways of developing SHP systems to change the narrative of power inadequacy will be presented. ",
"section_name": "Introduction",
"section_num": "1."
},
{
"section_content": "The present power issues in SSA in terms of accessibility, causes and consequences of inadequate access to energy will be examined.The study will take a look at the various sources of energy in the region, drawbacks of fossil fuels and the expected attributes of modern energy systems.Further, considerations will be given to the role of SHP in meeting greater power accessibility in the region and the attributes of modern energy systems that will promote the reduction of GHG emissions.The study will rely on centred on quantitative information and data taken from text books, government documents, published research articles, verified websites, news media, thesis, local and international organisations' reports and outlooks on power accessibility in SSA.The international organisations include International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), United Nations (UN), World Bank, REN21, International Energy Agency (IEA), and World Energy Council (WEC).The systematic steps and the layout of this study are shown in Fig 2. ",
"section_name": "Methodology",
"section_num": "2."
},
{
"section_content": "The traditional practice of cooking with biomass coupled with the use of fossil fuel gave rise to drudgery, fires, burns, GHG emissions, poisoning, economic prosperity impediment, and respiratory diseases leading to premature death in the region.Population without access to electricity and clean energy for cooking across the SSA, are shown in Fig 5 (a) and 5 (b), respectively [2].The Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of the United Nations has recognised the challenge of Greenhouse Gases (GHG).The goal of the Convention is to stabilise GHG concentrations to a level that would prevent hazardous anthropogenic meddling with the climatic condition of the atmosphere [17].The world's CO 2 emissions from fuel combustion -1971 to 2016 and world's CO 2 emissions from fuel combustion -1971 to 2016 by region measured in Metric tons of CO 2 equivalent (MtCO 2 ) are shown in Fig 6. The use of energy was reported to be the highest source of GHG due to CO 2 emissions, a by-product of fossil fuel combustion.Coal accounts for 29% of the 3. Electricity production, access, and consumption in SSA ",
"section_name": "Greenhouse Gases (GHG) emissions",
"section_num": "3.3."
},
{
"section_content": "The type of energy resource available for electricity generation in a region determines the source of power supply for the region to access.This section (subsections 3.1 to 3.3) takes a look at the share of SSA in the world's total primary energy supply (TPES), fossil fuel deployment and greenhouse gases emissions and electricity access The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reported in 2012 that the average rate of electrification in SSA is about 35%.It added that the situation is worse in the rural areas which were below 20%.Further, over 50% of the population in 41 countries in the region had no access to electricity [14].The region's share of the world totals primary energy supply (TPES) is very small, as shown in Fig 3 .Although one billion sub-Saharan Africans are expected to have access to electricity in 2040, about 530 million people will lack access, especially in the remote areas [15]. ",
"section_name": "Electricity access",
"section_num": "3.1."
},
{
"section_content": "Developing Asia and SSA dominate the over 2.8 billion people, which is about 38% of the global population, that lack access to clean cooking energy.Over 90% of cient power generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure [21].Industries and others electricity users in the region that are connected to the power grid experience an average of 56 days of power outage annually and this represents 15% darkness yearly [22].Consequently, firms lose 6% of sales revenues in the informal sector.The losses can be as high as 20% where back-up generation is inadequate [23].Hence, the region is in desperate need of power for socioeconomic growth [22,23].Due to the inadequate installed capacity, there is low energy consumption [24] and access, as a result, the commercial sector is compelled to deploy expensive generators.These generators serve as backup power suppliers and in some cases the only sources of electricity. substantially relies on fossil fuel for electricity and heat generation Global total primary energy supply (TPES) demand, which depends mainly on fossil fuels, doubled from 1971 to 2012, as depicted in Fig 9 [20].According to IEA, a further increase is expected in the use of fossil fuel through to 2030 in the new policies scenario [2], as shown in Fig 9 (b) and this will result to CO 2 emissions increase. ",
"section_name": "Fossil fuel and biomass",
"section_num": "3.2."
},
{
"section_content": "The economy of SSA is starving of energy due to gross inadequate access to electricity resulting from insuffi- sufficient electricity to meet the demand, as required by the growing population and urbanisation and for economic growth.The region's total installed capacity without South Africa (SA) is about 80 GW and this is equivalent to that of the Republic of Korea and one tenth of Latin America.South Africa generates around 40 GW while Nigeria which is over three times SA's population, generates only 7% of SA generation capacity.The factors responsible for power supply inadequacy in SSA are numerous and there are peculiarities and differences in these factors amongst the countries of SSA.These limitations are found in the main sections of a power supply system -generation, transmission and distribution.Across the region, facilities in these sections are experiencing insufficient funding, poor maintenance and management and over dependence on foreign power supply technologies and assistance, these have been identified by studies [30][31][32][33].Other common factors are under developed manufacturing infrastructure, the exorbitant cost of power projects and under developed human capacity in the power sector [34].This section, therefore, identifies and discusses the key factors that are responsible for SSA power access inadequacy in subsection 5.1 to 5.3. ",
"section_name": "Inadequate power supply impacts on the economy: high cost of running a business in SSA",
"section_num": "4."
},
{
"section_content": "The chronic electricity shortages coupled with insufficient transmission and distribution networks are fundamentally the causes of inadequate electricity access and consumption in most countries in SSA.Many countries in SSA do not generate enough electricity to distribute to the populace and the little generated does not wholly get to the users.A large amount of power is lost along the transmission lines due to sub-standard, and maintenance of power transmission and distribution facilities issues.Across the entire region, step down and the step up transformers are Nigeria has the largest number of diesel and petrol power generating sets market in Africa with a promising growth of 8.7% [25].The Power generators importation, mainly from China, Germany and the United Kingdom to Nigeria is expected to grow from $450 million in 2011 to about $950.7 million by 2020 [26].Although these generators are reliable, they run on fossil fuels (diesel and petrol) and this comes with consequences.These include air pollution and the high cost of doing business as the use of diesel or petrol generator costs about three times more than grid based supply.Annually, over $22 billion ($149 million for diesel, and $703 million for petrol) is spent on fuel for dedicated electric generators in Nigeria and this was described as the highest in the world [2,27].The average grid power tariff in SSA is US$0.13 per kWh as against the range of US$0.04 to US$0.08 per kWh grid power tariffs in most parts of the developing world [23,28].The estimated cost of power generated by diesel generating set is US$0.25/kWh[29].The deployment of a generator for manufacturing impacts hugely on the production costs and air pollution, making businesses that operate in SSA with much higher running costs than their equals elsewhere.This holds for businesses across all sectors, such as telecommunication, manufacturing, bank, agricultural and business services.There is a direct correlation between the use of generators and emissions gases because the generators burn fossil fuel, either diesel or petrol, and emit a lot of GHG and pollutants to the atmosphere. ",
"section_name": "Power supply facility",
"section_num": "5.1."
},
{
"section_content": "According to the World Bank, the power systems infrastructure in the region cannot adequately generate However, the situation is different in SA, as everything regarding power distribution cables in most cities seems to be right.This is one of the reasons that make SA accounts for 50% of the total power generated in the region. ",
"section_name": "Salient causes of inadequate electricity access",
"section_num": "5."
},
{
"section_content": "The power sector in SSA is receiving attention from both national and international players resulting in huge investments.Many power projects have been executed and several others are still on going and Table 1 presents significant power installations in 2013. The estimated annual investment required to adequately boost power access is $40.8 billion, which is equivalent to 6.35% of Africa's GDP [5].Government alone cannot bridge this large financial gap.Hence, the government-private partnership is needed to provide a substantial proportion of the fund needed under a longterm power purchase agreements (PPAs).If the investments in power generation, transmission, and distribution components are not stepped up, over 670 million people will lack access to electricity in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030. ",
"section_name": "Providing power sector investment funds",
"section_num": "5.2."
},
{
"section_content": "Since 2006, power sector reforms have been enacted in over 80% of SSA countries, this includes about 75% and 66% countries having their power sector privatised and corporatized state-owned utilities, respectively [33].The utility performance continues to be dwindling despite the reform measures. ",
"section_name": "Ineffective reforms",
"section_num": "5.3."
},
{
"section_content": "The challenges that trail SSA meeting its power demand are complicated by the current global position on fossil fuel and the negative environmental impacts resulting from the use of large hydropower (LHP) systems.There is a global outcry for affordable, secure, available, and environmentally sustainable energy systems [35][36][37][38].The United Nations have thrown its weight behind this by making energy for all by 2030 as one of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).The World Energy Council (WEC) in its perspective, opines that modern energy supply should be ",
"section_name": "Delivery of modern energy systems to SSA",
"section_num": "6."
},
{
"section_content": "Small hydropower refers to the generation of electrical power from a water source on a small scale, usually with a capacity of not more than 10 MW.However, there is still no internationally agreed upon definition of small hydropower as capacity classification varies from country to country, as shown in Table 2 [58,59].For rural and electrification of remote areas in developing countries, SHP or microhydropower has been described as the most effective energy scheme [60].A schematic of a hydropower plant is shown in Fig 11 .The technology is environmentally benign, extremely robust and long lasting -lasting for 50 years or more with little maintenance [61].Other striking benefits include [62,63]: minimal vandalisation of power facility; reduction in transmission losses; reduction in network problems (especially during raining season); reduction in illegal electricity connections to the national grid; the resource is in abundance and largely untapped; it emits low GHG (CO 2 ) and is regarded as a clean renewable energy source; it can create jobs; and it encourages energy diversification of systems thereby enhancing energy supply reliability in the region, etc.The global quest for cleaner energy to replace or minimise the use of fossil fuels which are the bulk of electricity generation in SSA favours the use of SHP.This will consequently reduce GHG emissions [64].Aggressive use of renewable energy in SSA will reduce CO 2 emissions by 27% in the region [1]. Hydropower is a part of the solutions required to overcome electricity inadequacies in both urban and rural areas.The use of hydroelectric lessens the global dependence on fossil fuels, promotes variable renewables via hybrid renewable energy system (HRES) and storage.Apart from power generation, hydropower provides several socioeconomic benefits that limit poverty and manage water effectively.The search for the best ways of supplying power to remote and rural areas and alternatives governed by three pillars, called energy trilemma -energy security, energy equity, and environmental sustainability [39].This is happening at the time that the region has the highest population that lack access to electricity and the highest poverty.It will be beneficial now and in the future and avoid waste of resources for SSA to concentrate more on the development of energy infrastructure that will promote energy sustainability: i. GHG emissions reduction -supplying clean, reliable, and renewable energy with low or no GHG emissions.ii.Deployment of low-cost and high power generation efficiency schemes iii.Energy security -increasing access to clean, affordable and adequate energy in rural and urban cities of SSA. ",
"section_name": "Small hydropower potentials in SSA",
"section_num": "7.1."
},
{
"section_content": "The electricity access challenge affects the rural dwellers most, as about 80% of the population in the rural areas have access to electricity.To overcome this scourge, things have been done differently from the grid connection.Electricity access in the region will be improved in remote and rural communities by the decentralised technologies, such as off-grid and minigrid systems.These are emerging power schemes that have dominated the discussions, research, development and the deployment of renewable energy to urban, remotes and rural areas in recent time [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51].The decentralised electrification technologies exploit available RE resources in a given place to provide clean, adequate, affordable and reliable power supply.The main RE resources for electricity generation in SSA are hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, wave and biomass.This study will only consider the significance of small hydropower system in improving electricity access and the wellbeing of the people in SSA.This power scheme has been tested and trusted in many countries and several studies have described SHP is a reliable electrification for rural areas in SSA [7,11,46,[52][53][54][55][56][57]. ",
"section_name": "Emerging power supply schemes",
"section_num": "6.1."
},
{
"section_content": "More development of SHP resources required in SSA to bridge power access inadequacy and to promote greater use of clean energy.Hence, this section discusses in subsection 7.1 to 7.3 -the SHP potential in SSA; a summary of systematic steps of SHP development; and the key limiting factors of SHP development in the region. ",
"section_name": "Developing Small hydropower in SSA",
"section_num": "7."
},
{
"section_content": "The development of SHP system can be divided into site assessment, civil works activities and electromechanical section development.The site assessment involves the hydrological, geological, and topographical study of the natural resource, such as river.In the site assessment and evaluation, data collection is the first stage of the sequence of activities that SHP development requires.This stage can be divided into four phases: planning, project approval, construction and exploitation.The assessment establishes the economic viability of the site.Designing of the civil work components based on the site to fossil fuel in SSA is receiving tremendous attention.This has led to several power schemes utilising REs, such as solar, geothermal, wind and SHP.However, hydropower has been identified as a RE potential, second to solar in terms of abundance and distribution, capable of adding substantially to power access in the region.The World Bank has stated that only 8 percent of the hydropower potential in SSA has been developed [66]. The SHP scheme has been described as an efficient power supply system for rural area and stand-alone electrification.It is a RE generation system that produces electricity at low cost, between 0.02/kWh and 0.05/kWh USD [68,69].A geospatial assessment study [70] of small-scale hydropower potential defines mini and SHP as 0.1-1 MW and 1-10 MW respectively.Power accessibility, fossil fuel and the exploitation of small hydropower technology in sub-saharan Africa coupled with the energy poverty of SSA, the huge SHP resource in the region is insufficiently tapped, as seen in Fig 14 [72]. The deployment and development of SHP in SSA are limited by lack of technology capacity; insufficient fund; ineffective framework and regional trade agreements; inappropriate power generation and distribution policies; unreliable hydrological data of potential sites; insufficient domestic product manufacturing participation and competitiveness; inadequate and unorganised SHP research and development (R&D); and lack of regional political will.However, these limitations are sometimes different from one country to another [73].Table 3 presents SHP development barriers peculiar to the difference regions in SSA [31,34,74].evaluation results is followed.The selection and sizing of the hydro turbine and the generator or alternator are carried out based on the capacity of the water body obtained via the hydrological study. ",
"section_name": "Developing SHP site",
"section_num": "7.2."
},
{
"section_content": "The deployment of SHP scheme in rural areas, and standalone electrification will provide improved access to clean and affordable electricity, and diversification of energy in SSA.It meets the modern attributes of power source to replace or reduce the use of fossil fuel, which is the main source of electricity generation in the region [71].Significant deployment of hydropower will reduce CO 2 emission by about 27% in the region [1].Despite these known merits The building of domestic capacity for hydro turbine manufacturing in the region will substantially reduce the cost of SHP projects, O&M and reduce downtime.The technical skills and manufacturing sector needed to develop SHP in the region are lacking and this creates challenges for domestic SHP components and system manufacturing.The building of SHP technical personnel and maximising of manufacturing capacities will systematically ameliorate and eliminate some of the identified issues, such as high cost of SHP project, and O&M [30].China is making tremendous progress in SHP because they do not outsource; both the human expertise and the manufacturing facilities are abundantly available in the country ",
"section_name": "Inadequate deployment and Challenges of SHP in SSA",
"section_num": "7.3."
},
{
"section_content": "It requires a multifaceted approach to overcome the present power challenges and to meet the future energy need of the region.The measures to address them must ",
"section_name": "Other Steps to improve the development of SHP",
"section_num": "8.2."
},
{
"section_content": "The section takes a look at ways of enhancing the development of SHP systems in SSA and these are briefly discussed in subsections 8.1 and 8.2. ",
"section_name": "Steps to improve the development of SHP",
"section_num": "8."
},
{
"section_content": "Operation and maintenance (O&M) costs of hydropower projects have increased by 40% since 2007 at inflation of 16% over the same time period.The cost rise is more challenging for the small plants' O&M as more fund ($ per kWh) is required compared to larger counterparts [75].There are several factors that account for the cost of SHP, which include electric market structure and source of equipment, the capacity of the project, availability of SHP technical personnel, the complexity of the site's topography, etc. Fig 16 shows that the cost of SHP electro-mechanical equipment is relative in countries in SSA.The cost of the SHP project is lowest Power accessibility, fossil fuel and the exploitation of small hydropower technology in sub-saharan Africa ",
"section_name": "Benefits of domestic manufacturing of hydro turbines",
"section_num": "8.1."
},
{
"section_content": "The sluggishness of SSA's economy is credited to the inadequate and epileptic power supply that is ravaging the region.Frankly, this is heart breaking considering the resources and efforts that have been put to change the situation.The electricity access rates of some countries in the region are about 20% and two-third of the population lack access to modern energy services.Industries and others electricity users in the region that are connected to the power grid experience an average of 56 days of power outage annually and this represents 15% darkness yearly. According to the World Bank, the power systems infrastructure in the region cannot adequately generate sufficient electricity to meet the demand, as required by the growing population and urbanisation and for economic growth.The chronic electricity shortages coupled with insufficient transmission and distribution networks are fundamentally the causes of inadequate electricity access and consumption in most countries in SSA.The challenges that trail SSA meeting its power demand are complicated by the current global position on fossil fuel and the negative environmental impacts resulting from the use of large hydropower (LHP) systems.There is a global outcry for affordable, secure, available, and environmentally sustainable energy systems.Globally, SHP has been identified as environmentally friendly, cost effective and simple renewable power scheme suitable for standalone and rural electrification.Domestic development of SHP parts and systems will lower SHP project cost and improve access to power in the region.This will require massive human capacity building and the use of locally soured materials and production facilities. be implemented simultaneously.China's SHP success model can be adopted by SSA to develop the huge SHP potential available in the region.This will require massive capacity building to improve the current SHP skill deficit and the development of manufacturing infrastructure to support domestic manufacturing of SHP components and systems.Other steps necessary to expedite the development of SHP include capacity building via reversed engineering and technology adaptive programmes; the use of locally sourced materials for turbine and other components fabrication [77,78]; execution of SHP project through governmentprivate partnership scheme; establishment of a regional joint programme to promote the development and the deployment of SHP; updated information on the potential sites should be provided; enactment of policy that compels existing power firm to provide fund for SHP R&D; and formulation of policy framework that limits the bureaucratic process in the development of SHP.Domestic participation in the design and manufacturing of SHP devices and systems in SSA will promote access to clean, and affordable electricity required to stimulate the region's economy.The power supply in the region will always be threatened by: overdependence on foreign technology which comes with consequences of the high cost of power project execution, inadequate skilled personnel for installation, operation, maintenance and repair challenges.Domestic manufacturing of hydro turbine can be achieved through the regional joint SHP technology capacity building in the following areas: foundry technology; mechatronics; fluid mechanics; manufacturing processes; and material development engineering.developing countries [67] ",
"section_name": "Conclusions",
"section_num": "9."
}
] |
[
{
"section_content": "The authors hereby acknowledge the Research and Postgraduate Support Directorate and the Management of Durban University of Technology, South Africa. ",
"section_name": "Acknowledgement",
"section_num": null
}
] |
[
"Department of Mechanical Engineering, Durban University of Technology, Steve Biko Road, Durban, South Africa."
] |
null |
How can urban manufacturing contribute to a more sustainable energy system in cities?
|
The paper explores future opportunities as well as challenges arising from urban manufacturing (UM) regarding the design of sustainable energy systems for cities. Global trends affect the type of production (e.g. Industry 4.0) as well as the industrial structure (e.g. convergence of services and production) of UM in cities. This causes new requirements but also new options for the urban energy system. The study presented in this paper examines this area of tension and explores not only the potentials of waste heat use, but also additional electricity demand through steadily advancing digitalisation. The study illustrates, that over the next few years it will be key to improve the interfaces between actors and sectors: between companies ("energy communities"), between industry and grid/ energy supply company/neighbouring settlement areas and between the sectors heat-electricitygas-mobility through e.g. power-to-x and possible uses of hydrogen. The paper concludes with a concept for integrating urban manufacturing optimally in the urban energy system for a sustainable energy transition in the future.
|
[
{
"section_content": "In the last decade, the trend towards re-industrialisation has become noticeable in developed cities, including many Austrian cities such as Vienna, Linz and Steyr.It has been increasingly recognized that the industrial sector is one of the key drivers for economic growth and jobs [1] which is also relevant for cities [2].However, urban manufacturing has to deal with specific framework conditions in cities due to high density resulting in little space and high rental prices, close neighbourhood to residential areas and difficult traffic conditions.Thus, integrating urban manufacturing (UM) into the urban fabric as smoothly as possible, is a must for keeping UM in cities.This also addresses the energy system where an optimisation of demand and supply with high energy efficiency and renewable energy sources (RES) integration must be strived for. This paper presents the results of a study on \"Energetic effects of urban manufacturing in the city -ENUMIS\" [3] conducted for the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology (BMVIT) funded within the research programme \"Cities of Tomorrow\".The ENUMIS study focuses on two key questions: 1) How can framework conditions be created to keep manufacturing companies in cities or to promote the establishment of new industry?2) Which waste heat utilisation potentials from industrial and commercial enterprises are available in selected Austrian municipalities and which changes on the energy supply side can be expected from UM? Based on the study results, the paper explores future opportunities as well as challenges arising from The paper is organized along 4 sections.After this introduction the results of quantitative and qualitative analysis conducted in the study will be presented in section 2. On the one hand, expert interviews and stakeholder workshops with representatives from industry, companies, research and city administration had been conducted for identifying the key issues and discussing opportunities and potentials in a future sustainable energy supply through UM from a practical point of view.On the other hand, the energetic impacts of UM were examined more closely and waste heat potentials from industry and commerce in selected Austrian cities were estimated.These results feed into defining the role of digitalisation in UM for the future energy transition which will be presented in section 3. Special focus is laid on the potentials and challenges for UM trough digitalisation and industry 4.0 and its implications on the urban energy system.Finally, in section 4, the paper concludes with a concept for integrating UM optimally in the urban energy system for a sustainable energy transition in the future. ",
"section_name": "Introduction",
"section_num": "1."
},
{
"section_content": "The City of Vienna commits itself to the provision of attractive and affordable locations for urban production and innovation and aims for an adequate land development strategy with the development of the thematic concept \"Productive city\" [2].However, challenges that UM brings are to be found in the field of transport, economy and environment (emissions): UM causes traffic in the entire city which can lead to considerable traffic obstructions and congestion in mixed residential UM regarding the design of sustainable energy systems for cities. UM is understood as producing industry that is city-compatible, mixable, embedded in a digital environment, research-intensive and which generates high added value in the city [2].The benefits of UM are seen in avoiding increasing delivery routes, high land consumption and a better integration and usage of renewable energies [4].However, cities in transition and global trends are changing the type of production (Industry 4.0, digitalisation, electrification) as well as the industry structure (tertiarisation, convergence of services and production).For keeping UM in the city or even attracting new companies, the provision of a sustainable and secure energy supply is essential.The big challenge is to anticipate changes in the energy demand (and production) of UM and to optimally integrate UM into the urban energy system.Our study addresses exactly this open issue for selected Austrian cities.It is based on two previous studies on UM, which had been carried out by Fraunhofer Austria (FhA) [5] and superwien urbanism ZT OG [6] who were both partners in our project.In the course of these studies a structural analysis of the urban industry had been conducted and the future of UM in cities had been analysed.Our ENUMIS study brings this knowledge into an energy context and explores the effects for the urban energy system.Considering the structural changes, the study researches potentials for waste heat use as well as additional electricity demand expected trough steadily advancing digitalisation.This delivers a comprehensive overview of the effects of these new requirements on the energy system but also of new options for energy supply. ",
"section_name": "Potentials of UM for the energy system",
"section_num": "2."
},
{
"section_content": "Cities of tomorrow need to become sustainable, liveable and prospective.One of the key topics is \"urban production\".From an ecological, economic and social point of view, it is more sustainable to produce within the city.The program \"City of Tomorrow\" is researching and developing new technologies and solutions for future cities and urban developments.Its focus lies on the reduction of energy consumption and the use of renewable energies in buildings and city quarters as well as increasing the quality of living within cities. The study provides orientation in the context of urban manufacturing and makes a first contribution to the technical involvement of relevant actors in the manufacturing sector.The results will help us to develop political measures for the development of new sustainable energy systems and will share first recommendations how to better connect research institutions with companies and energy suppliers. ",
"section_name": "Acknowledgement of value",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "Environmental Technologies Choosing relevant business sectors based on the NACE classification (European classification of economic activities) 2 Assessment of the energy consumption based on employee-specific energy parameters (kWh/ employee) 3 Assessment of the waste heat potentials assuming a sector-specific shares of the energy consumption to be available as waste heat Due to the use of characteristic sector-specific average values, the waste heat potentials can only be estimated at a rough level.Thus, a detailed examination (measurement, real consumption figures etc.) is necessary in the next step.However, the rough analysis gives a good overview of possible existing potentials and hotspots in the city, which should be considered in detail. Figure 1 presents the results of selected sectors of the waste heat potential estimation in 8 Austrian cities investigated.The waste heat potentials were evaluated according to their future usability and are therefore divided into the following temperature level classes (1) Low temperature (30-100°C), which is directly in low temperature systems (e.g.underfloor heating) or can be raised to higher temperature levels by heat pumps (2) Medium temperature (100-500°C), lower ranges can be directly fed into a district heating system, higher ranges can be used for converting into electrical energy (3) High temperature (> 500°C), can be directly used for conversion into electrical energy or must be cooled for feeding into a district heating network. Generally, some sectors such as bakeries and laundries are well suited for a location in the city, while companies in the chemical, rubber and plastics, paper or iron and steel sectors are more likely to settle on the outskirts or in the countryside due to high emissions or space requirements.Nevertheless, the analysis shows that some companies from these sectors can still be found within the city borders.In most cases they have traditionally been at this location for many years or even decades and waste heat could be used to heat neighbouring residential or industrial areas.To discuss the results of the analyses and to receive input from a practical point of view, opportunities and potentials in the area of a future sustainable energy supply through UM were discussed in a stakeholder workshop.The participants gave valuable input to round off the picture derived from desk research and quantitative analysis. areas where UM is per definition mainly located.Considering the economic pressure on the cities, land is mostly dedicated to residential use rather than industrial use, as higher profits are to be expected.This leads to the fact that it is becoming more and more difficult for companies to settle in urban areas and find affordable land.However, interviews and workshops with representatives from industry, urban planning, neighbourhood management, energy suppliers and manufacturing companies made clear that UM not only holds challenges, but also promises opportunities and potentials.A location in the city offers direct proximity to customers and highly qualified expert staff which promotes productivity.In the context of energy, the mixed land use is an opportunity for using renewable energies in a local heat network.In new urban areas, the use of locally available renewable energy sources can be promoted by an obligatory energy concept.Furthermore, the definition of the energy supply in the zoning plan or urban planning concepts could ensure the use of locally available energy sources.In general, using energy-political regulatory mechanisms supports the beneficiary use of the synergies from UM.However, it is crucial that the political will on the part of the city is given and a \"caretaker\" in the company or neighbourhood/town district shoulders the responsibility to engage the stakeholders and to facilitate the process. In parallel to the qualitative analysis of the potentials, the energetic impacts of UM were examined more closely and waste heat potentials from industry and commerce in selected Austrian cities were estimated using a bottom-up approach.The already available studies are usually based on four basic methods: using publicly available carbon dioxide emission data from the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) [7], estimating the efficiency of the plants, machines and processes [8], sending out questionnaires [9] or doing measurements.Since most companies' data on energy consumption are not publicly available, the methodological approach, that had been developed in the previous project HEAT_re_USE.Vienna [10], was applied.It is based on open data from the Austrian statistical office (number of employees) to calculate industry-specific energy consumption (detailed description in [11] [12]).From this, the amount of waste heat was estimated proportionately, differentiated by sectors as well as by low, medium and high temperature classes.The approach follows these steps: proportion of total final energy consumption meaning that the importance of electricity as an energy source will increase [18]. Due to the wave of digitization, which is often described as \"Industry 4.0\" in the manufacturing environment, the manufacturing sector is undergoing a significant change.It enables the expansion of renewable energies via controlling and regulation of the system to meet the challenges of decentralisation and flexibilization [13].New technologies and developments such as cyber-physical systems, higher automation, humanrobot collaboration, cloud solutions and increased computing power also present opportunities for UM.Digitization is often referred to as the enabler of the energy revolution and offers opportunities to transform the energy sector into the digital age [19,20].This leads to the rollout of intelligent measurement systems (smart meters) and the use of smart grids, which enable load management within the distribution network. Although potentials are high, actual future development and true effects of digitalisation on the energy demand are associated with a high level of uncertainty.Experts are not yet sure how digitization will affect the ",
"section_name": "Theodor Zillner, Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology. Energy and",
"section_num": null
},
{
"section_content": "According to the Austrian Climate and Energy Strategy [13], the objective is to cover 100% of total electricity consumption (national balance) from national renewable energy sources by 2030.With currently 72% share (status 2017) [14] of renewables for electricity generation, Austria is well ahead in the ranking of EU [13].However, the Austrian industry sector has a high proportion of energy-intensive basic industry and is still highly dependent on fossil fuels.In 2017, the energy and industry sector accounts for about 45% of the total greenhouse gas emissions in Austria [15].Energy saving, energy efficiency, integration of renewables and electrification will be key elements for an industrial energy transition [15] and go hand in hand with digitalisation. The global trend of digital transformation affects UM which will transform to service-oriented production [16,17].This change must also be accompanied by a change in the energy supply system.The share of electricity in the energy mix of households and services has risen significantly since 1970.In the future, electricity consumption will increase both in absolute terms and as a Figure 1: Waste heat potentials of 8 selected Austrian cities differentiated by three temperature classes in MWh/a, own illustration energy, waste heat recovery is a considerable mean to reduce their environmental footprint.Stockholm provides a good practice example where a data centre operator (DigiPlex) and heating and cooling supplier (Stockholm Exergi) signed a heat reuse agreement for heating up to 10,000 modern residential apartments with recovered data centre waste heat [25]. ",
"section_name": "The role of digitization in UM for the future energy transition",
"section_num": "3."
},
{
"section_content": "The previous research fed into the development of a concept for integrating UM optimally in the urban energy system illustrated in Figure 2. It illustrates that new requirements occur through changes in type of production and in the industrial structure which lead to new demands on energy supply (both electricity and heat). Changing energy demand from UM can be related to e.g.digitalisation in traditional UM sectors or to new sectors like 3D printing, vertical farming or data centres which become an essential precondition for UM.New options for the urban energy system arise through changing roles of UM to a prosumer and producer of waste heat and RES.The trend is clearly in the direction of blurring the boundaries between consumers and producers, between heat, electricity, gas and mobility sectors (sector coupling) and between commercial/industrial and residential sectors.As also Heinisch et al. [26] state in their work, the electricity, heating, and transport sectors in urban areas all must contribute to meet the overall energy consumption.In the study \"Digital Transformation to the Energy World\" [21] carried out by the Austrian Energy Agency in 2017, around 40 experts were asked about how digitization will affect the energy demand.35% believe in an increase, 47% think the energy demand will not change and 15% believe in a decrease.The International Energy Agency [20] estimates that energy saving potentials of about 10% can be reached through smart technologies in the buildings sector.In industry further efficiency potentials are particularly seen by improved process controls, 3D-printing, machine learning and enhanced connectivity.However, although the potential savings can be leveraged through digitization, they are overshadowed by rebound effects and the additional demand generated.Research already focusses on how to manage the growing energy by information and communication infrastructures [22].Experts agree, however, that only digitization will enable the broad expansion of decentralised renewable energy sources and the necessary flexibilization of energy demand [20,21] and can initiate a backshoring of manufacturing activities back to the European market [23]. In this context data centre play an essential role -they are the backbone for digitalisation and closely interwoven with Industry 4.0.As such they are becoming relevant components in the energy system of UM.The world-wide energy demand of data centres is assumed to be about 1.5% of the world´s electric power consumption and is increasing significantly in the future [24].As all this energy is ultimately transformed into thermal Figure 2: Concept for integrating UM optimally in the urban energy system, own illustration utilities and consumers with the ability to control their systems.The focus will be on the rollout of smart meters and smart homes in order to develop urban smart districts like e.g. in Rome [29].As a result, data volumes will increase, and more computing power and storage space will have to be made available. Beside new requirements also new options for the energy system occur (right side of Figure 2), including the possibility of using waste heat from industrial processes.Companies can become energy sources for local microgrids and provide power heat for other businesses or neighbouring settlements.Among other things, there is also the possibility to generate electricity from waste heat (at low temperature for example via ORC processes) or to feed PV from hall roofs into a local grid.In addition to billing-related issues (billing via blockchain, fees for the use of the public grid), legal issues also arise (electricity seller becomes an energy supplier with associated obligations). In addition to the production of renewable energy, UM can also become a consumer of a surplus of renewable energy.Either because they can directly use the electricity in production processes at RES peak times or save it for later.For example, heating or cooling processes could be carried out electrically at a time of high RES supply or discontinuous batch processes could be coordinated therewith (demand-side-management). To focus more strongly on the new role of UM companies in the energy system, targeted district management and forward-looking energy planning (for example for low-exergy systems) can make a significant contribution.It offers assistance and a framework for the energy strategy in companies. Concluding, research has shown that for most of the solutions, that UM would optimize from an energy perspective, the technological requirements are largely available.However, over the next few years, it will be necessary to intensify the testing of technologies in demonstration projects and to improve the interfaces between actors and sectors: between companies (\"energy communities\"), between industry and grid/energy supply company/neighbouring settlement areas and between the sectors heat -electricity -gas -mobility through e.g.power-to-x and possible uses of hydrogen.Demonstration projects on load management for heat and electricity, waste heat and surplus electricity use (power-to-heat) in industry should be pushed and be tested under real-life conditions to prepare for large-scale use in the future.The concept for integrating UM optimally in the urban climate targets.In this context, storage options are becoming increasingly important.This makes it possible to bridge energy generation and demand over time, make better use of fluctuating renewable generation, balance short-term load fluctuations and control production processes in a grid-stabilizing way.UM companies can offer different potentials depending on the sector and production process: many companies need most of the energy during the day, at times when demand from households is low; some have the potential to adjust their production (e.g. in batch processes) to when a lot of energy is available and cheap (power-to-product); they have storage potentials (heating and cooling processes (power-to-heat/cool), own storage) and the possibility to produce and make and offer heat and electricity themselves. The increased use and integration of renewable energy sources that also come from UM in the energy system create additional new requirements for the energy system.Sector coupling is seen as a key concept of the energy transition and in building carbon-free energy systems [13].Previously separate systems, the energy consuming sectors buildings (heating and cooling), transport and industry are interlinked with the power sector.The increasing use of electricity from renewable energy sources in all sectors supports the decarbonisation of the energy system but is also associated with new challenges. According to the Masterplan 2050 from the Swiss municipal utility Swisspower [27], this system change requires a paradigm shift: \"In order to efficiently coordinate the large number of new, decentralized energy producers, an intelligent local management of supply and demand across all energy sources is needed.\"In the future, the network infrastructure will have to take a balancing and storage function in addition to its transport function and balance fluctuations in energy generation from volatile sources such as wind and sun.All systems must exchange information with each other on an ongoing basis in order to achieve optimal results.The Viennese distribution system operator Wiener Netze GmbH will also focus on similar topics in the future.Smart grids and digitalisation, which enables communication between the individual plants and grids, can significantly optimise grid planning and forecasting, provided that the data is available at all times.Smart grids should also make it possible to consume electricity exactly when it is generated primarily by renewables [28].Smart technologies are intended to provide both ",
"section_name": "Concept for integrating UM optimally in the urban energy system & Conclusions",
"section_num": "4."
}
] |
[
{
"section_content": "This article was invited and accepted for publication in the EERA Joint Programme on Smart Cities' Special issue on Tools, technologies and systems integration for the Smart and Sustainable Cities to come [30]. ",
"section_name": "Acknowledgements",
"section_num": null
}
] |
[
"aAIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH, Giefinggasse 4, 1210 Vienna, Austria"
] |
null | "Methodology to characterize a residential building stock using a bottom-up approach: a case study a(...TRUNCATED) | "In Europe, the residential sector accounts for 27% of the final energy consumption[1], and therefor(...TRUNCATED) | [{"section_content":"different bottom-up building physics residential stock models which present dif(...TRUNCATED) | [{"section_content":"The authors acknowledge the financial support of Electrabel. ","section_name":"(...TRUNCATED) |
[] |
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National Energy and Climate Planning in Serbia: From Lagging Behind to an Ambitious EU Candidate?
| "Just in the immediate neighbourhood of the European Union (EU), the Republic of Serbia, one of the (...TRUNCATED) | [{"section_content":"The effects of climate change, also evident in Serbia [1] and the region of Wes(...TRUNCATED) | [{"section_content":"Funds for I.B.B. are provided by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technol(...TRUNCATED) |
[
"a Institute of Technical Sciences of SASA, Knez Mihailova 35/IV, Belgrade, Serbia"
] |
null | [{"section_content":"Since the energy crisis in the 70' s energy demand has been on the agenda of re(...TRUNCATED) | [{"section_content":"This work was only possible due to the financial support given by Fundação pa(...TRUNCATED) | ["DGEG -Direcção-Geral de Energia e Geologia, Portuguese Energy and Geology Agency HDD -Heating De(...TRUNCATED) |
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https://doi.org/10.5278/ijsepm.2018.17.5
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Assessment of a climate-resilient and low-carbon power supply scenario for Rwanda
| "Renewable energy sources are playing a key role in the transition to a low-carbon based economy whi(...TRUNCATED) | [{"section_content":"Climate change has negatively affected electricity supply systems around the wo(...TRUNCATED) | [{"section_content":"Théoneste Uhorakeye and Bernd Möller 3.4.Power supply under RCP8.5Under RCP8.(...TRUNCATED) | ["Department of Energy and Environmental Management (EEMSESAM), Interdisciplinary Institute for Envi(...TRUNCATED) |
https://doi.org/10.5278/ijsepm.2015.7.5
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A Non-linear Stochastic Model for an Office Building with Air Infiltration
| "This paper presents a non-linear heat dynamic model for a multi-room office building with air infil(...TRUNCATED) | [{"section_content":"In large-scale power systems with a high penetration of wind power, the intermi(...TRUNCATED) | [{"section_content":"The work was partly funded by DSF (Det Strategiske Forskn-ingsråd) through the(...TRUNCATED) |
[] |
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