Cities have become the focus of global climate mitigation efforts because as they are responsible for 60%–70% of energy-related CO2 emissions. As the world is increasingly urbanized, it is crucial to identify cost-effective pathways to decarbonize and enhance the resilience of cities, which ensure the well-being of their dwellers. Here, we propose a ‘SolarEV City’ concept, in which integrated systems of cities’ roof-top photovoltaics and electric vehicles (EVs) supply affordable and dispatchable CO2-free electricity to urban dwellers. Our analyses indicate that implementations of the concept can meet 53%–95% of electricity demands in nine major Japanese urban areas by 2030. CO2 emission from vehicle use and electricity generation in these areas can be reduced by 54%–95% with potential cost savings of 26%–41%. High cost-effectiveness and seasonally stable insolation in low latitudes may imply that the concept may be more effective to decarbonize urban environments in emerging economies in low latitudes. Among several factors, governmental interventions will play a crucial role in realizing such systems, particularly in legislating regulations that enhance penetration of the integrated system of PV and EV and enable formation of decentralized power systems. As bottom-up processes are critical, policy makers, communities, industries, and researchers should work together to build such systems overcoming social and regulatory barriers.
In the face of an emerging and novel pandemic, perceptions of its danger and probability of being affected can influence how an individual take precautionary actions. We performed an exploratory study to examine how travellers perceive the risk-related to COVID-19 and how the outbreak has affected their commuting and non-commuting travel activities. Building on previous studies, we propose a working hypothesis of personal risk perception and trip adjustment decision and collect information to preliminary check our hypothesis. We report on our work, and the results of an online survey carried out between March 12-19, 2020, which collected 71 responds from countries in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East in this working paper. Our results illustrate how the respondents altered their travel, their rationales, the precautionary actions they took, their foremost concerns, the sources of information they based their decisions on, and how useful they found teleconference as an alternative. Also, we observed their risk-related perception concerning the proposed model. We found several potential correlations and some regional and country variations but were unable to draw any definitive conclusion due to the limited sample size. We share our preliminary results here for discussion purposes.
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