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

Abstract

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.

Caracterización de agentes de consumo energético en el sector residencial del Ecuador basada en una encuesta nacional y en los sistemas de información geográfica para modelamiento de sistemas energéticos

“…Es importante recalcar que se pueden emplear encuestas ya hechas que proporcionan diferentes bases de datos. En consecuencia, una consideración importante es caracterizar agentes que ayuden a reflejar la heterogeneidad de la población que fue estudiada (Jalil-Vega et al, 2020).…”

Evaluating Spatial Interdependencies of Sector Coupling Using Spatiotemporal Modelling

“…Other research also tried to include economic considerations of SC [3]. Another example is the work of Jalil-Vega et al [22], who developed an optimisation model for urban energy systems and evaluated scenarios for heating, cooling, electricity, and transport. The investigations were carried out for spatially delimited zones and the research urges for a spatial differentiation when it comes to energy system planning.…”

Heterogeneity of UK residential heat demand and its impact on the value case for heat pumps

“…A note must be made on the uncertainty for fixed operational and maintenance (O&M) costs for HP systems observed in academic, industrial and governmental sources. For instance, fixed annual O&M costs ranged from £120 to £243 for ASHP systems, see (BEIS and Element Energy, 2017;Jalil-Vega et al, 2020;Mitsubishi Electric, 2016;NIBE, 2020;Oluleye et al, 2018). The baseline O&M costs modelled here are approximate median values found across the various sources.…”