Dataset Information

The influence of urban form on the grid integration of renewable energy technologies and distributed energy systems.

ABSTRACT: Standard and newly designed building blocks for complex urban sites- also designated by urban archetypes - are used in this study to quantify the influence of urban forms on their energy demand and energy systems design. An energy hub, which consists on a multi-carrier energy system involving multiple energy conversion, storage and/or network technologies, is employed to quantify the impact of the urban morphology on the energy system requirements. This study reveals that urban archetypes have a notable influence on the heating and cooling energy demands of city districts that can be characterized using form factors and floor area ratio. However, the influence on demand profiles cannot be assessed based on the aforementioned indicators. The cost of energy systems can increase up to 50% due to the impact of urban forms that are well beyond the increase of peak and/or annual energy demands. In addition, renewable energy integration to the grid as well its utilization in districts is influenced by urban forms. This makes it essential to consider energy system design as a part of the urban planning process moving even beyond building simulation.

SUBMITTER: Perera ATD

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6882853 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

The influence of urban form on the grid integration of renewable energy technologies and distributed energy systems.

Perera A T D ATD Coccolo Silvia S Scartezzini Jean-Louis JL

Scientific reports 20191128 1

Standard and newly designed building blocks for complex urban sites- also designated by urban archetypes - are used in this study to quantify the influence of urban forms on their energy demand and energy systems design. An energy hub, which consists on a multi-carrier energy system involving multiple energy conversion, storage and/or network technologies, is employed to quantify the impact of the urban morphology on the energy system requirements. This study reveals that urban archetypes have a ...[more]

PMID: 31780681

Similar Datasets

Project description:Renewable energy will potentially make an important contribution towards the dual aims of meeting carbon emission reduction targets and future energy demand. However, some technologies have considerable potential to impact on the biodiversity of the environments in which they are placed. In this study, an assessment was undertaken of the realistic deployment potential of a range of renewable energy technologies in the UK, considering constraints imposed by biodiversity conservation priorities. We focused on those energy sources that have the potential to make important energy contributions but which might conflict with biodiversity conservation objectives. These included field-scale solar, bioenergy crops, wind energy (both onshore and offshore), wave and tidal stream energy. The spatially-explicit analysis considered the potential opportunity available for each technology, at various levels of ecological risk. The resultant maps highlight the energy resource available, physical and policy constraints to deployment, and ecological sensitivity (based on the distribution of protected areas and sensitive species). If the technologies are restricted to areas which currently appear not to have significant ecological constraints, the total potential energy output from these energy sources was estimated to be in the region of 5,547 TWh/yr. This would be sufficient to meet projected energy demand in the UK, and help to achieve carbon reduction targets. However, we highlight two important caveats. First, further ecological monitoring and surveillance is required to improve understanding of wildlife distributions and therefore potential impacts of utilising these energy sources. This is likely to reduce the total energy available, especially at sea. Second, some of the technologies under investigation are currently not deployed commercially. Consequently this potential energy will only be available if continued effort is put into developing these energy sources/technologies, to enable realisation of their full potential.

Project description:Although the importance of addressing ecosystem service benefits in regional land use planning and decision-making is evident, substantial practical challenges remain. In particular, methods to identify priority areas for the provision of key ecosystem services and other environmental services (benefits from the environment not directly linked to the function of ecosystems) need to be developed. Priority areas are locations which provide disproportionally high benefits from one or more service. Here we map a set of ecosystem and environmental services and delineate priority areas according to different scenarios. Each scenario is produced by a set of weightings allocated to different services and corresponds to different landscape management strategies which decision makers could undertake. Using the county of Cornwall, U.K., as a case study, we processed gridded maps of key ecosystem services and environmental services, including renewable energy production and urban development. We explored their spatial distribution patterns and their spatial covariance and spatial stationarity within the region. Finally we applied a complementarity-based priority ranking algorithm (zonation) using different weighting schemes. Our conclusions are that (i) there are two main patterns of service distribution in this region, clustered services (including agriculture, carbon stocks, urban development and plant production) and dispersed services (including cultural services, energy production and floods mitigation); (ii) more than half of the services are spatially correlated and there is high non-stationarity in the spatial covariance between services; and (iii) it is important to consider both ecosystem services and other environmental services in identifying priority areas. Different weighting schemes provoke drastic changes in the delineation of priority areas and therefore decision making processes need to carefully consider the relative values attributed to different services.

Dataset Information

The influence of urban form on the grid integration of renewable energy technologies and distributed energy systems.

Publications

The influence of urban form on the grid integration of renewable energy technologies and distributed energy systems.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets