Integrating the energy costs of urban transport and buildings

Osorio, Bruno Manuel; McCullen, Nick; Walker, Ian; Coley, David

doi:10.1016/j.scs.2017.04.020

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 75 publications

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“…When data are not provided on the local level, we take the larger territorial units (Spanish provincial level-NUTS level 3 [37]) and apply different downscaling factors, depending on the sector and energy source. Downscaling is a usual way to perform estimations at local level when there are not enough local information sources [21,28], but there is no systematic method for this approach. We adopt this perspective as it seems to be the closest to actually knowing the energy flows that are transformed into useful energy in the area of study, thus allowing us to estimate the energy product imports that are required.…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This approach has recently been used for two larger Spanish cities: Madrid [17], in which an energy balance is carried out with top-down data sources, and Valencia [18], in which a combination of top-down and bottom-up methodologies are used to solve the lack of data. There are other methodologies to describe the final energy consumption, adopting only a bottom-up approach [19][20][21][22]. In addition, there is a wide range of methodologies linked to the urban metabolism discipline [23,24], which is combined with a social activity analysis [25,26] or other sustainability indicators [27][28][29].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Mapping the Energy Flows and GHG Emissions of a Medium-Size City: The Case of Valladolid (Spain)

Manzanera-Benito

Capellán‐Pérez

2021

Sustainability

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Valladolid (Spain) is a medium-size city (~300,000 inhabitants) that established a greenhouse (GHG) emissions reduction target in 2011 of 20% from 2010–2020. However, tracking the evolution of GHG in medium-size cities is challenging due to the general lack of compulsory data collection at this scale and issues with boundaries when attempting alternative estimates. Here, we propose and apply a novel method to estimate the evolution of GHG emissions due to energy consumption for the period of 2010–2019 in Valladolid, combining top-down and bottom-up data following a physical energy flows approach. The energy consumption of the city is estimated by main sectors and types of energies. The results show that, throughout the past decade, both total energy consumption and its sector end-use share did not significantly change: final energy consumption remained at around 24 MWh (86.5 GJ) per capita and was still highly dependent on fossil fuels, especially natural gas and oil products (over 70% of total energy supply). The GHG reduction by 2019 was ~11% with relation to 2010 and, thus, had not reached the set objective; in per capita terms, the GHG reduction was lower (~6%) due to population loss during the period. The trend, however, has not been monotone and has instead followed a U-shape strongly correlated with the economic crisis and subsequent recovery, suggesting that transition policies have had, at most, a modest effect on the overall results. The analysis shows, first of all, the limitations of statistical sources at a local level, both for energy and mobility, which do not allow more accurate results in identifying the main energy consumers to be reached; and, secondly, the need for strong decarbonization measures which have to be set urgently at all the relevant institutional levels. Reaching GHG neutrality in the city by 2050 requires reducing the GHG emissions by ~13%/year, which is ~20 times faster than for the 2010–2019 average of 0.6%/year.

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Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping the Energy Flows and GHG Emissions of a Medium-Size City: The Case of Valladolid (Spain)

Manzanera-Benito

Capellán‐Pérez

2021

Sustainability

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“…A simple metric was used to measure the energy use of both buildings and transport, which was introduced in a previous work (Osório et al, 2015(Osório et al, , 2016. The metric includes only the operational energy of buildingsdirectly linked to short-term urban features that interact with transportand the commute transport carbon footprint, converted to energy use.…”

Section: The Energy Use Metricmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the Relationship between Energy Consumption and Urban Form

Osorio¹,

McCullen²,

Walker³

et al. 2017

AJS

Self Cite

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A large proportion of energy demand comes from urban areas, mostly from buildings and transport, the use of which has impacts on climate and air quality through the emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. The research in this paper investigates the relationship between the selected urban form characteristics and energy consumption in England, in order to understand how one influences the other. The influence of urban form is recognized in many aspects of cities, such as human behavior and transport dynamics. Consequently, it is also expected to have a significant impact on energy consumption and to be a key component in future urban sustainability. Urban energy consumption is calculated at a large geographic scale of analysis combining the consumption of both buildings and commute transport. Urban form indicators are obtained for the same land-parcels and correlations between the two calculated. The results demonstrate that a variety of urban form characteristics influence energy consumption. Some measures show little correlation with energy consumption, whereas other density measures show a significant scaling relationship. Therefore, density indicators such as population density are suggested as a means to explain urban energy consumption. Additionally, the results reveal that the relationship between energy consumption and urban characteristics follows a sublinear scaling relationship and hence show an economy of scale. This analysis suggests that better energy efficiency is achieved by areas with higher population density, which provides new insights to urban policy-makers and planners seeking to design strategies to cut carbon emissions and energy consumption.

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“…In [32] Osório, McCullen, Walker, and Coley propose a methodology for estimating energy consumption in buildings and transport in a spatially-resolved manner. This research is not an energy systems model, but it introduces a new data-based energy metric to calculate energy consumption of both buildings and transport that can serve as input for other spatiallyresolved energy systems models that include mobility and building energy demands.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatially-resolved urban energy systems model to study decarbonisation pathways for energy services in cities

2020

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This work presents the COMET (Cities Optimisation Model for Energy Technologies) model, a spatially-resolved urban energy systems model that takes into account energy service demands for heating, cooling, electricity, and transport, and finds cost-effective pathways for supplying these demands under carbon constraints, trading-off energy supply, network infrastructure, and end-use technologies. Spatially-resolved energy service demands were obtained for the city of Sao Paulo, and six scenarios were modelled. Results show that district cooling is cost-effective in the highest linear cooling density zones, with full penetration in zones with over 1100 kWh/m by 2050. This threshold diminishes with tighter carbon constraints. Heating is electrified in all scenarios, with electric boilers and air-source heat pumps being the main supply technologies for the domestic and commercial sectors respectively by 2050. In the most carbon constrained scenario with a medium decarbonised electricity grid, ground source heat pumps and hydrogen boilers appear as transition technologies between 2030 and 2045 for the commercial and domestic sectors respectively, reaching 95% and 40% of each sector's heat installed capacity in 2030. In the transport sector, ethanol cars replace gasoline, diesel, and compressed natural gas cars; compressed natural gas buses replace diesel and electric buses; and lorries continue using diesel. In carbon constrained scenarios, higher penetrations of electric cars and buses are obtained, while no change is observed for lorries. Finally, the most expensive scenario was only 6% more expensive than the reference scenario, meaning that achieving decarbonisation targets is not much costlier when comparing scenarios from a system-wide perspective.

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Integrating the energy costs of urban transport and buildings

Cited by 8 publications

References 75 publications

Mapping the Energy Flows and GHG Emissions of a Medium-Size City: The Case of Valladolid (Spain)

Mapping the Energy Flows and GHG Emissions of a Medium-Size City: The Case of Valladolid (Spain)

Understanding the Relationship between Energy Consumption and Urban Form

Spatially-resolved urban energy systems model to study decarbonisation pathways for energy services in cities

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