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The Great Transformation: Cities and Regions Embracing Renewable Energy
I N T R O D U C T I O N
The Great Transformation: Cities and Regions Embracing Renewable Energy Peter Droege Liechtenstein Institutes for Strategic Development, Vaduz and Berlin
Imagine a world thriving in abundant and ubiquitous energy for all, based only on sunshine, wind, and water, powering and empowering our cities and communities from within at little or no resource cost, building local prosperity and strengthening security and social cohesion: a world in which energy is just no issue—and the source of everyone’s wealth at the same time. Imagine energy and energy technology as embedded dimensions in this new city, rather than as external sources or a supply system. They are now no longer imported commodities, but intrinsically essential urban functions. This scenario lies within reach not only because it is so easily imaginable and compelling, but because it has already been demonstrated across many cities, towns, businesses, and communities today. Imagine a world without oil wells and pipelines, coal mines, radiation alarms—or undemocratic power decisions made behind closed doors by the few against the interests of the many. Instead, a diverse, yet connected, multitude of renewable transport, building- and industry-integrated generation and transmission systems will completely supplant the centralized power behemoths of the 19th and 20th Urban Energy Transition https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102074-6.00001-2
centuries. This new energy world is renewable and sustainable, local and yet global, continental and regional. It emerges as a loose and redundant tangle of systems, kept energized by a myriad of consumers and providers, often and frequently switching roles. It links power, heat and cooling, storage and networks, stationary and mobile systems and agents. Applied in islands and across grids alike, it embraces utilities and networks as enablers, and communities as accountable partners. This new world liberates and empowers, resists control by monopolies, and sidesteps attacks by terrorists alike. Here, cities power themselves and their regions, providing their own industrial, transport, agricultural, and residential energy. Virtually indistinguishable from cities and their economies, energy infrastructures will be financed and owned by communities, investors, users, and producers. This is an equitable and exciting world of intelligent prosumers, engaged city leaders, and advanced self-sufficient industries and communal cooperatives, made elegant, proficient, and efficient by intelligent power sensors, energy web architectures, and software based trading platforms using blockchain and other electronic accounting systems.
1
Copyright # 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
2
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: CITIES AND REGIONS EMBRACING RENEWABLE ENERGY
And now envision how to get there from here. To plot the plethora of possible pathways between the already achieved and the still needed: this is what this book is about. As a handbook, it aims to be helpful along the way, in policy, practical, conceptual, and visionary ways. The volume serves many audiences: what may seem utopian to some has already become a reality for others. True, energy supplies in the early 21st century are still overwhelmingly fossil fuel based and kept centralized in the doggedly defended inertia of incumbent interests—but the great and dynamic transformation is already underway and tangibly active, from individual initiatives to industrial investments. Energy is everything—and nothing is solid: such is a most basic tenet of quantum physics. In cities, too, energy is everything, and everything is in flux, even when only concentrating on the commercially tradeable energy infrastructure: electric, thermal, and kinetic—its modes, forms, and technologies, and its policy frames and financially enacted transformations. Cities are all about energy, both in the cultural sense of their dynamic vibrancy and vitality, and historically, in the sense of their very spatial and power structures being shaped by their energy technology. Cities are physically formed of and around energy infrastructure: they are increasingly connected and sophisticated bundles of generation, distribution, networking, and storage systems bridging power, thermal energy and mobility, storage, and networks. Urban centers and their neighborhoods and districts, but also their wider regions, become particularly critical, if not essential, in the great energy transformation defining the 21st century—more tangibly so than each of the sectoral domains of agriculture, industry, or transport. This transformation follows a wider emerging trend: the rise of renewable electricity as paramount societal infrastructure around which thermal, mobile, storage, network, and, above all, power carrier and conversion strategies are woven, enabling
ubiquitous energy harvest, storage, dispatch, and arbitrage—but also local trading and financial empowerment, for individuals, neighborhoods, districts, and regions. This is where city energy is significant also in a metaphorical sense. Cities have been admired and aspired to, as centers of command, control, and communication; engines of growth; drivers of innovation; refuges for the needy; seats of tyrants and homes of enlightened citizens; machines and targets of war; and hotbeds of global culture, taste, and fashion. So-called modern cities—those of the 20th century—and their form and growth dynamics were, and continue to be, driven by the spread of that most pernicious potion of all fatal elixirs: petroleum—but also other fossil fuels in their gaseous, liquid, and solid forms. As a result, the much vaunted “urban age” is actually an era of a staggering urban explosion, a mythical media matrix of hope and desire, promise and prosperity, fantasy and entertainment, and of alienation and suffering, disillusionment and fear, perpetual conflict and insatiable environmental rapaciousness. The fact that it generated such unflinching admiration and awe can also be traced to the overpowering rise of its awesome incendiary drivers: global coal, petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear power industries. Here lies a fatefully fixated association of the metaphorical energy of vibrant cities with the sheer and raw force of various mass energy systems in their early and late-modern incarnations: that false holy grail of a global combustion craze. Like the addicted and the obsessed, too many of us—and especially many of the politically and economically powerful—still do not seem to be able to let go of this cultural fixation easily, even while facing their own ruin. All of this could be ignored were it not for the relentless forces of time, physics, and chemistry. A vast greenhouse gas stream is constantly being pumped into an atmosphere long oversaturated with fossil fuel exhausts, if we take the planet’s ability to maintain a habitable
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: CITIES AND REGIONS EMBRACING RENEWABLE ENERGY
temperature and biological equilibrium as the “saturation” gauge. This system has been overtaxed already for some time. To bring it to a sustainably steady state, nothing short of an immediate and all-consuming emergency agenda akin to battle mobilization is required— a mainstream movement at war with its own incumbent energy habits. When it comes to the organization of societal action, cities are at a distinct advantage over national governments: local communities can measure time and change in immediate and concrete outcomes. City and also state or provincial leaders can be held accountable in more direct ways than national politicians can ever be. As a result, so many cities and urban alliances have risen as energy policy makers, innovators, contractors, producers, consumers, and implementers, in this great transformation toward a renewable world. Nowhere is that change felt more strongly than in the shifts from old-style centralized power supply contracts to a ubiquitous world of energy markets, increasingly interconnected with if not defined by global, regional, and local information systems. The actual shift to renewable energy may not yet have become quite mainstream, even in Germany where more than a third of electricity is provided by renewable sources, but its very idea has long galvanized an entire technology savvy generation, particularly because it fits the new decentralized paradigm of a networked society. In the popular imagination of tech afficionados, it increasingly connects the idealized civic benefits of ubiquitous computing and telecommunications of the 1980s with those of an energy singularity, embracing encrypted electronic accounting systems providing access to every energy user on the grid, however small or large. The energy web is here to stay since it was mooted more than ten years ago (Droege, 2006). There are accumulative tendencies, too: this new world is the fact that the largest growth in solar PV has been in grid connected centralized power—reversing its ratio to grid connected decentralized power
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from earlier days of PV introduction more than a decade ago (REN21, 2017). Many city leaders have become mindful of, or even expert in, aspects of the urban energy revolution. One experience is common to all: each path is one of individual discovery. This volume therefore is not a collection of bestpractice city cases, but a thematic journey across a number of topics of interest to students and practitioners of urban energy transitions alike. It documents both significant and patchy progress since its first edition a decade earlier: significant in moving beyond the normal shifts that all fields of inquiry are subject to—in science and technology, theory and practice, and in zeitgeist and politics—and patchy, because in these 10 years, urban, regional, and state energy transformation programs proliferated with far less equivocation, wavering, or vacillation among national leaders, where too much “low-carbon” lip service is still being paid without concrete action. And even here among cities, progress has been neither uniform nor all-encompassing across the landscape of possible city agendas, and even within leading cities, a comprehensive renewable energy reliance is by no means a standard base practice, or even universal aspiration yet, in declarations of intent, let alone measurable as capital investments in infrastructure or urban development projects. Great innovations spread across many cities of the industrialized world, prospering in policies, programs, urban projects, papers, and institutional frameworks, in both regulation and finance. They fired up a myriad of conferences. Yet they continue to only slowly reach, and are all too often even ignored, in many cities and regional conurbations of the global South. Institutional barriers and inertia, dependency on incumbent suppliers, and other hurdles have put a hard break on change. And yet, it is here where the opportunities are greatest, not only in the development of renewable energy sources and networks, but also in embracing a resource metabolism that cities of the North have long
4
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: CITIES AND REGIONS EMBRACING RENEWABLE ENERGY
aspired to, linking food, waste, water, and energy, as Steffen Lehmann points out in this volume, and to which others allude. Finally, no city (or region) is an island. Urban energy transition progress is captured within larger industry and public policy frames and restrictions: the speed in emissions progress, for example, is either significantly boosted or constrained by state, national, and international policies, regulations, and manipulations. Despite the limitations and the halting progress, cities and regions still rank among the most tangible and dynamic change agents in transformative energy policy and societal action worldwide. The steady rise of renewable energy policy adoptions and target setting measures—for example among United States and European urban centers and agglomerations— is expressed not only in the numbers of active urban energy programs, but also in the rising popularity of renewable energy among voters and corporate constituents in general. A significant change since the late 2000s has been the sharp decline in the cost of renewable energy systems and their production. This helped boost the worldwide growth of installed renewable energy capacity, recording an expansion of almost 660% in wind and over 5000% in photovoltaic installed capacity between 2006 and 2016. Worldwide investment rose from 113 to 242 billion USD in the 10 years to 2016. Despite a numerical, in part system-price based reduction of almost a quarter in new investments from 2015 to 2016, new renewable energy investments continued to outstrip those in new fossil and nuclear generation by a factor of two (REN21, 2017). This helps explain, in part, why strong progress and very substantial renewable energy transformations are achieved by companies, countries, states, and local communities—against a background of persistent, even growing, policy resistance at some national levels, inspired by incumbent industries. The quest for leaving the fossil and nuclear age behind is felt equally strongly among local
communities, urban governments, and leading industries: a perfect trio of change agents. Primarily accountable to local communities and businesses cities also depend on state and national institutions. And here, fault lines are building: decreasing political support for climate policies and renewable energy is exerted by national governments that find themselves captive to conventional energy lobbies and interests such as once-progressive Germany, Spain, and the perennially reluctant Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United States. China, by contrast, has become a new global champion of a top-down climate agenda and renewables support. Of the nearly one terawatt (921 GW) in installed renewable energy capacity available in 2016, the largest shares were found in China, the United States, and Germany, in that order (REN21, 2017). While the market advances in renewables have been marked and encouraging, the rearguard pressure exerted by coal, oil, gas, and uranium industries and their public policy supporters comes at the worst possible time. After a decade of spotty to strong growth, a period of flagging political commitment to renewable energy deployment threatens to set in. Global climate emission reduction measures and agreed targets, ranging from the late Kyoto Agreement to the Paris Climate Accord, continue to be missed by a wide margin. It has become obvious to all who look at the science that only an immediate, comprehensive and effective campaign to end fossil fuel production and combustion can help sustain life on this planet—accompanied by a simultaneous drive to build and restore the carbon management capacity of agricultural lands, wetlands, waterways, sea grass beds, forests—and the entire material and building industry—in a quest to take up the excessive levels of atmospheric carbon in the atmosphere before methane feedback overwhelms any human efforts at reduction. Global statistics point to a decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions—and the annual emissions growth has indeed begun to
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: CITIES AND REGIONS EMBRACING RENEWABLE ENERGY
actually level off, while the global economy kept churning on and growing, as rightly celebrated by Peter Newman in the first chapter of this volume. Yet atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to rise at an increasing rate: the Earth’s carbon cycles continue to be overwhelmed, and are possibly already in feedback mode—pointing to the looming possibility of the more than doubling of current greenhouse gas concentrations in a relatively short period of time. These past 10 years have been foreboding in the way emission indicators have developed—combined with the ubiquitous signs of early climate destabilization. These were 10 years in which atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rose from 385 annual mean parts of CO2 per million (ppm) to 403.26 in 2016—up from 400 in 2015 (NOAA, 2018) to 410 ppm in the year of publication of this volume, 2018. These were 10 years in which global carbon cycle dynamics—under unabated pressure from wanton fossil fuel combustion, industrialized agriculture, wholesale land clearing, and unfettered cement production—began to approach a number of climate tipping points: in the cryosphere, across global forest cover, in the oceans, and the atmosphere itself. Ten years in which the very rate of emissions increases continued to rise. Ten years in which the health costs of urban fossil energybased pollution levels continued to soar, and peak air pollution levels spiked in cities around the world to toxic, fatal levels. The biggest and most existential hope—on par with universal nuclear disarmament—is for a widespread und unified awakening across global board rooms and parliaments—and a massively accelerated systemic transformation, away from manically squeezing tar sands, away from manipulating nations into territorial warfare, and away from foolishly fossicking for oil in a melting Arctic, or desperately drilling for it in remnant nature reserves. “Not In Our Names” has become the unwritten motto of so many community leaders. Some have gone further, if only still cautiously, and so very late
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in the process: in announcing a five billion dollar lawsuit brought by the City of New York against five petroleum companies; Mayor Bill de Blasio remarked in January 2018: “It’s up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient” (Milman, 2018). Cities and regional governments, including state authorities, have found solace and motivation in the many ways of inventing, financing, and implementing their own new renewable energy investment strategies and projects, perhaps because they are often left to their own devices. Here, a new frontier has opened and new realities have been shaped: urban governance frameworks that in the past seemed less than ideally suited for local energy realities have been informed by effective efficiency campaigns, demand market management, and 100% renewable energy drives. Several cities have been selected for this book because they have modified their administrative and policy apparatuses to advance energy transitions. Both relative veterans such as the City of Aspen in the US state of Colorado, and dynamic newcomers such as Canberra, seat of the Australian capital, teach us about various ways of achieving full renewable energy independence. They stand for countless others, epitomized by the Global Covenant of Mayors, the European Association of Local Authorities in Energy Transition, the renewables drive of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, C40, and many others. The global transport sector, at the time of writing this introduction, was still more than 95% fossil fuel dependent, as described by Jeff Kenworthy in his new findings on hopeful signs in a system of “glacial” inertia. It undergoes systemic changes from within that promise a rapid late-stage transformation, accelerating exponentially. Industrial references that pale in comparison with the nascent transformation of the transport sector include the rapid replacement of plain-old-telephony by multimodal digital
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THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: CITIES AND REGIONS EMBRACING RENEWABLE ENERGY
services in the late 1980s, or of film and paper based photography and print by digital imaging and graphic media from the 1990s into the early 2000s: explosive, ubiquitous, networked, multi- and trans-modal, manipulated and, at least seemingly so, accessible to all. Momentous emerging transformations may appear as disruption—but are always preceded and prepared by long-evolving technological trends, innovations, and other changes. Yet even if vehicle—bicycle, car, bus, train, and plane—propulsion were on the verge of becoming electric, and even if all cities were to be powered by the sun tomorrow morning, this could not absolve governments, businesses, and communities from two other great immediate responsibilities. The first responsibility is curbing the consumption of scarce, rapidly depleting natural resources; and the second is slowing, even halting, the onset of runaway climate change through a rapid restoration and strengthening of the Earth’s biological capacity to lower atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations through afforestation, wetland, and moorland rebuilding; the transformation of agriculture into a CO2 adsorbing land use. This means also the conversion of all building and material production into a ubiquitous storage project for atmospherically harvested carbon. The lifestyle based dimension of embedded and imported energy consumption is a vast, and yet still largely ignored, challenge in city policies. The experience leading to this volume suggests that due to the lack of public policy attention expended on it, it is also starved of research funds. And the greenhouse gas sequestration in land cover and aquatic systems, but also carbon rich building and infrastructure materials—using carbon pulled from the air—forms part of a vast scientific and industrial domain that has not really touched the day-to-day policy framework or significantly impacted practice perimeters of cities and regions.
These are at once the most hopeful and unnerving times—the kind of times the applicable Chinese proverb calls “rich in opportunities.” The second edition of Urban Energy Transition continues to probe an ominous and forked point in urban and human history: which way will we turn? Will we careen further down fossil fuel alley, a dark and dangerous cul-de-sac in which some governments and major industries still keep their constituents erring about—or indeed escape the carbon cave into the light: embracing cities and regions that prosper under enlightened local, state, and national leadership on their renewable resources, creating both great visions and great value for their communities, businesses, and local and regional environments? Whatever the future holds for us all, this much is certain: cities and regions that are free of fossil and nuclear dependency will not only help slow the global ride into a different climate, but also fare incomparably better socially, economically, and environmentally in the unfolding climate drama.
SYNOPSIS OF THE BOOK AND ITS CHAPTERS Four major themes structure this book— design, technology, finance, and planning. These are themed clusters of current and linked work in the world of urban and regional energy transition, rather than comprehensive treatments of broad topics. These large topics center on aspects essential to city design; on systems and technologies, on finance and investment—and on governance and planning tools. The themes are very broad and chosen for the convenience of entry for the reader, not as a result of scientific precision: these themes flow through many, perhaps most, papers. The 63 authors hail from research centers such as the European Research Academy’s (EURAC) Institute for Renewable Energy, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), and the Institute for
SYNOPSIS OF THE BOOK AND ITS CHAPTERS
€ Ecological Economic Research (IOW), several exponents of new energy-oriented industries, renewable energy foundations such as the Foundation for Renewable Energy (FREE), and a number of universities, from Curtin University to HafenCity University Hamburg, the Technical University of Delft, Oxford Brookes, and Zhengzhou University. The countries represented by the community of authors are Australia, China, Germany, Ghana, Italy, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Introduction describes the role of cities and regional entities in the global transition to renewable energy. The chapter “Designing the essential city” is a cri de coeur and homage to a missing link: the glaring absence of the great Energy Disruption from mainstream architecture and urban planning curricula as core activity: it focuses on the importance of prioritizing renewable energy transformations in conceptualizing and designing our cities. To set the tone, Peter Newman convincingly frames the many positive signs for the dawn of the renewable city. John Byrne and John Taminiau make the powerful case for cities becoming solar and other renewable energy-based energy sources. The comprehensive range of opportunities for climate responsive neighborhood design in the urban system is framed by Federico Butera, especially for tropical climate regions. A call for a comprehensive renewable energy infrastructure as a means of nurturing vital civic support for Gaza and its wider region is issued by Peter Droege, Sherman Teichman, and Cody Valdes, in a wider, global climate for peace. Anis Radzi powerfully traces findings related to 100% renewable energy districts in two German cities, Frankfurt and Munich, and the opportunities for good governance in guiding it. The extraordinary role of International Building Exhibitions in cities’ and regions’ climate change action is illustrated by Uli Hellweg, while Werner Sobek articulates his practical vision for seeding the electric city with a new
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generation of active houses. Soeren Schoebel proposes various ways of integrating landscape, urban design, and renewable energy transformation. And the new electric highway is envisioned by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Robert Barnstone, highlighting the need for spatial reconciliation through systems integration— and substitution. In the chapter “Systems and Technologies,” Jeff Kenworthy provides fresh findings from comparing public and private transport practices from around the world, while he and Yuan Gao, Peter Newman, and Weixing Gao take a particularly focused look at two Chinese cities, Beijing and Shanghai, to draw conclusions for cities elsewhere. The central importance of energy storage systems and the principles of linking power, heat, mobility, and batteries is laid out by Ingo Stadler and Michael Sterner. Bernd Hirschl uses findings from Berlin to drive home the message that cities can become transformed from energy sinks to regional sources of surplus renewable energy. How to transcend ailing and vibrant retail machines—inner-urban shopping malls—into renewable energy sources, is postulated by Grazia Barchi, Roberto Lollini and David Moser. Two sweeping and intensive glimpses at urban thermal energy follow: Wolfram Sparber, Roberto Fedrizzi and Chiara Dipasquale provide a guide to the thermal city globally; and Julika Weiss, Elisa Dunkelberg, and Bernd Hirschl explore this very topic more systemically from a German view point. The logic and power of photovoltaic as building and city-integrated technology is further explored by David Moser, Marco Lovati, and Laura Maturi. A view from the solar power industry, legislation, and appurtenant lessons from a Southeast Asian city is presented by Jessie Todoc. Energy, water, food, and waste form a systemic nexus in all cities—indeed, the human economy at large—and Steffen Lehmann provides an important spotlight on Southeast Asian cities from a different viewpoint, through the lens of an urban nexus-themed research program.
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SYNOPSIS OF THE BOOK AND ITS CHAPTERS
Investment, Finance, Tariffs, and Value provide the theme for a chapter anchoring the financial dimension of the urban energy transition. Jemma Green, David Martin, and Megan Cojocar focus on the untouched market of activating renewable energy assets in communities through blockchain technology—speaking for an entire class of emerging asset management tools. From the city that is home to Australia’s national government, Canberra, a team of experts describes the use of targeted tariffs, markets, and auctions in recently achieving 100% renewable electricity: Greg Buckman, Dorte Ekelund, Stephen Bygrave, Jon Sibley, and Megan Ward. From the Rocky Mountain Institute, Victor Olgyay and Iain Campbell present their business model for engendering and maintaining renewable energy based urban districts. Bernd Hirschl, Katharina Heinbach, and Steven Salecki track the multiple financial value-added and creation opportunities resulting from local and regional renewable energy transformations. The wider dividend accruing from engaging in focused and determined energy transitions is framed by Adriano Bisello and Daniele Vettorato. There is a fundamental need to disconnect regional economies from fossil fuel contaminated global currencies, and Shann Turnbull outlines a solar strategy to provide fundamental financial stability. The chapter Governance, Community, and Planning contains both general and specific principles, models, and tools of policy and planning for renewable energy-based communities. A broad overview of the governance dimension is provided by Joerg Knieling and Katharina Lange. Joyce McLaren analyzes and narrates the path to 100% renewable power by one of the United States’ pioneering cities; Aspen,
Colorado; and highlights the role of practical governance in achieving this. Two contrasting and complementary views of African cities follow: a governance-aware look at Sub-Saharan African cities by Simon Bawakyillenuo, Mark Olweny, Megan Anderson, and Mark Borchers; and at enablers of progress in South African cities, by Megan Anderson and Mark Borchers. The chapter finally features three in-depth looks at mapping enabled modeling tools and applications: the local and regional GIS scenario mapping model Space Time and Renewables (STAR), as applied to the European four-country region of Lake Constance by Peter Droege, Dieter G. Genske, Ariane Ruff and the model and mapping empowered urban energy master planning approach from the Netherlands, by Andy van den Dobbelsteen, Rob Roggema, Nico Tillie, Siebe Broersma, Michiel Fremouw, and Craig Lee Martin; and a detailed account of an energy use mini-atlas of low-carbon communities in the United Kingdom is provided by Rajat Gupta and Matt Gregg.
References Droege, P., 2006. Renewable City—A Comprehensive Guide to an Urban Revolution. Wiley Academy, Chichester. Milman, O., 2018. NYC plans to divest $5bn from fossil fuel and sue five oil companies. Retrieved on 22 January from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/10/ new-york-city-plans-to-divest-5bn-from-fossil-fuels-andsue-oil-companies. NOAA, 2018. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth Systems Research Laboratory. Retrieved on 22 January 2018 from: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/ gmd/ccgg/trends/monthly.html. REN21, 2017. Global renewable energy status report 2017. Retrieved on 22 January 2018 from: http://www.ren21. net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/17-8399_GSR_2017_ Full_Report_0621_Opt.pdf.
The Great Transformation: Cities and Regions Embracing Renewable Energy Peter Droege Liechtenstein Institutes for Strategic Development, Vaduz and Berlin
Imagine a world thriving in abundant and ubiquitous energy for all, based only on sunshine, wind, and water, powering and empowering our cities and communities from within at little or no resource cost, building local prosperity and strengthening security and social cohesion: a world in which energy is just no issue—and the source of everyone’s wealth at the same time. Imagine energy and energy technology as embedded dimensions in this new city, rather than as external sources or a supply system. They are now no longer imported commodities, but intrinsically essential urban functions. This scenario lies within reach not only because it is so easily imaginable and compelling, but because it has already been demonstrated across many cities, towns, businesses, and communities today. Imagine a world without oil wells and pipelines, coal mines, radiation alarms—or undemocratic power decisions made behind closed doors by the few against the interests of the many. Instead, a diverse, yet connected, multitude of renewable transport, building- and industry-integrated generation and transmission systems will completely supplant the centralized power behemoths of the 19th and 20th Urban Energy Transition https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-102074-6.00001-2
centuries. This new energy world is renewable and sustainable, local and yet global, continental and regional. It emerges as a loose and redundant tangle of systems, kept energized by a myriad of consumers and providers, often and frequently switching roles. It links power, heat and cooling, storage and networks, stationary and mobile systems and agents. Applied in islands and across grids alike, it embraces utilities and networks as enablers, and communities as accountable partners. This new world liberates and empowers, resists control by monopolies, and sidesteps attacks by terrorists alike. Here, cities power themselves and their regions, providing their own industrial, transport, agricultural, and residential energy. Virtually indistinguishable from cities and their economies, energy infrastructures will be financed and owned by communities, investors, users, and producers. This is an equitable and exciting world of intelligent prosumers, engaged city leaders, and advanced self-sufficient industries and communal cooperatives, made elegant, proficient, and efficient by intelligent power sensors, energy web architectures, and software based trading platforms using blockchain and other electronic accounting systems.
1
Copyright # 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
2
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: CITIES AND REGIONS EMBRACING RENEWABLE ENERGY
And now envision how to get there from here. To plot the plethora of possible pathways between the already achieved and the still needed: this is what this book is about. As a handbook, it aims to be helpful along the way, in policy, practical, conceptual, and visionary ways. The volume serves many audiences: what may seem utopian to some has already become a reality for others. True, energy supplies in the early 21st century are still overwhelmingly fossil fuel based and kept centralized in the doggedly defended inertia of incumbent interests—but the great and dynamic transformation is already underway and tangibly active, from individual initiatives to industrial investments. Energy is everything—and nothing is solid: such is a most basic tenet of quantum physics. In cities, too, energy is everything, and everything is in flux, even when only concentrating on the commercially tradeable energy infrastructure: electric, thermal, and kinetic—its modes, forms, and technologies, and its policy frames and financially enacted transformations. Cities are all about energy, both in the cultural sense of their dynamic vibrancy and vitality, and historically, in the sense of their very spatial and power structures being shaped by their energy technology. Cities are physically formed of and around energy infrastructure: they are increasingly connected and sophisticated bundles of generation, distribution, networking, and storage systems bridging power, thermal energy and mobility, storage, and networks. Urban centers and their neighborhoods and districts, but also their wider regions, become particularly critical, if not essential, in the great energy transformation defining the 21st century—more tangibly so than each of the sectoral domains of agriculture, industry, or transport. This transformation follows a wider emerging trend: the rise of renewable electricity as paramount societal infrastructure around which thermal, mobile, storage, network, and, above all, power carrier and conversion strategies are woven, enabling
ubiquitous energy harvest, storage, dispatch, and arbitrage—but also local trading and financial empowerment, for individuals, neighborhoods, districts, and regions. This is where city energy is significant also in a metaphorical sense. Cities have been admired and aspired to, as centers of command, control, and communication; engines of growth; drivers of innovation; refuges for the needy; seats of tyrants and homes of enlightened citizens; machines and targets of war; and hotbeds of global culture, taste, and fashion. So-called modern cities—those of the 20th century—and their form and growth dynamics were, and continue to be, driven by the spread of that most pernicious potion of all fatal elixirs: petroleum—but also other fossil fuels in their gaseous, liquid, and solid forms. As a result, the much vaunted “urban age” is actually an era of a staggering urban explosion, a mythical media matrix of hope and desire, promise and prosperity, fantasy and entertainment, and of alienation and suffering, disillusionment and fear, perpetual conflict and insatiable environmental rapaciousness. The fact that it generated such unflinching admiration and awe can also be traced to the overpowering rise of its awesome incendiary drivers: global coal, petroleum, natural gas, and nuclear power industries. Here lies a fatefully fixated association of the metaphorical energy of vibrant cities with the sheer and raw force of various mass energy systems in their early and late-modern incarnations: that false holy grail of a global combustion craze. Like the addicted and the obsessed, too many of us—and especially many of the politically and economically powerful—still do not seem to be able to let go of this cultural fixation easily, even while facing their own ruin. All of this could be ignored were it not for the relentless forces of time, physics, and chemistry. A vast greenhouse gas stream is constantly being pumped into an atmosphere long oversaturated with fossil fuel exhausts, if we take the planet’s ability to maintain a habitable
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: CITIES AND REGIONS EMBRACING RENEWABLE ENERGY
temperature and biological equilibrium as the “saturation” gauge. This system has been overtaxed already for some time. To bring it to a sustainably steady state, nothing short of an immediate and all-consuming emergency agenda akin to battle mobilization is required— a mainstream movement at war with its own incumbent energy habits. When it comes to the organization of societal action, cities are at a distinct advantage over national governments: local communities can measure time and change in immediate and concrete outcomes. City and also state or provincial leaders can be held accountable in more direct ways than national politicians can ever be. As a result, so many cities and urban alliances have risen as energy policy makers, innovators, contractors, producers, consumers, and implementers, in this great transformation toward a renewable world. Nowhere is that change felt more strongly than in the shifts from old-style centralized power supply contracts to a ubiquitous world of energy markets, increasingly interconnected with if not defined by global, regional, and local information systems. The actual shift to renewable energy may not yet have become quite mainstream, even in Germany where more than a third of electricity is provided by renewable sources, but its very idea has long galvanized an entire technology savvy generation, particularly because it fits the new decentralized paradigm of a networked society. In the popular imagination of tech afficionados, it increasingly connects the idealized civic benefits of ubiquitous computing and telecommunications of the 1980s with those of an energy singularity, embracing encrypted electronic accounting systems providing access to every energy user on the grid, however small or large. The energy web is here to stay since it was mooted more than ten years ago (Droege, 2006). There are accumulative tendencies, too: this new world is the fact that the largest growth in solar PV has been in grid connected centralized power—reversing its ratio to grid connected decentralized power
3
from earlier days of PV introduction more than a decade ago (REN21, 2017). Many city leaders have become mindful of, or even expert in, aspects of the urban energy revolution. One experience is common to all: each path is one of individual discovery. This volume therefore is not a collection of bestpractice city cases, but a thematic journey across a number of topics of interest to students and practitioners of urban energy transitions alike. It documents both significant and patchy progress since its first edition a decade earlier: significant in moving beyond the normal shifts that all fields of inquiry are subject to—in science and technology, theory and practice, and in zeitgeist and politics—and patchy, because in these 10 years, urban, regional, and state energy transformation programs proliferated with far less equivocation, wavering, or vacillation among national leaders, where too much “low-carbon” lip service is still being paid without concrete action. And even here among cities, progress has been neither uniform nor all-encompassing across the landscape of possible city agendas, and even within leading cities, a comprehensive renewable energy reliance is by no means a standard base practice, or even universal aspiration yet, in declarations of intent, let alone measurable as capital investments in infrastructure or urban development projects. Great innovations spread across many cities of the industrialized world, prospering in policies, programs, urban projects, papers, and institutional frameworks, in both regulation and finance. They fired up a myriad of conferences. Yet they continue to only slowly reach, and are all too often even ignored, in many cities and regional conurbations of the global South. Institutional barriers and inertia, dependency on incumbent suppliers, and other hurdles have put a hard break on change. And yet, it is here where the opportunities are greatest, not only in the development of renewable energy sources and networks, but also in embracing a resource metabolism that cities of the North have long
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THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: CITIES AND REGIONS EMBRACING RENEWABLE ENERGY
aspired to, linking food, waste, water, and energy, as Steffen Lehmann points out in this volume, and to which others allude. Finally, no city (or region) is an island. Urban energy transition progress is captured within larger industry and public policy frames and restrictions: the speed in emissions progress, for example, is either significantly boosted or constrained by state, national, and international policies, regulations, and manipulations. Despite the limitations and the halting progress, cities and regions still rank among the most tangible and dynamic change agents in transformative energy policy and societal action worldwide. The steady rise of renewable energy policy adoptions and target setting measures—for example among United States and European urban centers and agglomerations— is expressed not only in the numbers of active urban energy programs, but also in the rising popularity of renewable energy among voters and corporate constituents in general. A significant change since the late 2000s has been the sharp decline in the cost of renewable energy systems and their production. This helped boost the worldwide growth of installed renewable energy capacity, recording an expansion of almost 660% in wind and over 5000% in photovoltaic installed capacity between 2006 and 2016. Worldwide investment rose from 113 to 242 billion USD in the 10 years to 2016. Despite a numerical, in part system-price based reduction of almost a quarter in new investments from 2015 to 2016, new renewable energy investments continued to outstrip those in new fossil and nuclear generation by a factor of two (REN21, 2017). This helps explain, in part, why strong progress and very substantial renewable energy transformations are achieved by companies, countries, states, and local communities—against a background of persistent, even growing, policy resistance at some national levels, inspired by incumbent industries. The quest for leaving the fossil and nuclear age behind is felt equally strongly among local
communities, urban governments, and leading industries: a perfect trio of change agents. Primarily accountable to local communities and businesses cities also depend on state and national institutions. And here, fault lines are building: decreasing political support for climate policies and renewable energy is exerted by national governments that find themselves captive to conventional energy lobbies and interests such as once-progressive Germany, Spain, and the perennially reluctant Australia, Canada, Japan, and the United States. China, by contrast, has become a new global champion of a top-down climate agenda and renewables support. Of the nearly one terawatt (921 GW) in installed renewable energy capacity available in 2016, the largest shares were found in China, the United States, and Germany, in that order (REN21, 2017). While the market advances in renewables have been marked and encouraging, the rearguard pressure exerted by coal, oil, gas, and uranium industries and their public policy supporters comes at the worst possible time. After a decade of spotty to strong growth, a period of flagging political commitment to renewable energy deployment threatens to set in. Global climate emission reduction measures and agreed targets, ranging from the late Kyoto Agreement to the Paris Climate Accord, continue to be missed by a wide margin. It has become obvious to all who look at the science that only an immediate, comprehensive and effective campaign to end fossil fuel production and combustion can help sustain life on this planet—accompanied by a simultaneous drive to build and restore the carbon management capacity of agricultural lands, wetlands, waterways, sea grass beds, forests—and the entire material and building industry—in a quest to take up the excessive levels of atmospheric carbon in the atmosphere before methane feedback overwhelms any human efforts at reduction. Global statistics point to a decoupling of economic growth from carbon emissions—and the annual emissions growth has indeed begun to
THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: CITIES AND REGIONS EMBRACING RENEWABLE ENERGY
actually level off, while the global economy kept churning on and growing, as rightly celebrated by Peter Newman in the first chapter of this volume. Yet atmospheric CO2 concentrations continue to rise at an increasing rate: the Earth’s carbon cycles continue to be overwhelmed, and are possibly already in feedback mode—pointing to the looming possibility of the more than doubling of current greenhouse gas concentrations in a relatively short period of time. These past 10 years have been foreboding in the way emission indicators have developed—combined with the ubiquitous signs of early climate destabilization. These were 10 years in which atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rose from 385 annual mean parts of CO2 per million (ppm) to 403.26 in 2016—up from 400 in 2015 (NOAA, 2018) to 410 ppm in the year of publication of this volume, 2018. These were 10 years in which global carbon cycle dynamics—under unabated pressure from wanton fossil fuel combustion, industrialized agriculture, wholesale land clearing, and unfettered cement production—began to approach a number of climate tipping points: in the cryosphere, across global forest cover, in the oceans, and the atmosphere itself. Ten years in which the very rate of emissions increases continued to rise. Ten years in which the health costs of urban fossil energybased pollution levels continued to soar, and peak air pollution levels spiked in cities around the world to toxic, fatal levels. The biggest and most existential hope—on par with universal nuclear disarmament—is for a widespread und unified awakening across global board rooms and parliaments—and a massively accelerated systemic transformation, away from manically squeezing tar sands, away from manipulating nations into territorial warfare, and away from foolishly fossicking for oil in a melting Arctic, or desperately drilling for it in remnant nature reserves. “Not In Our Names” has become the unwritten motto of so many community leaders. Some have gone further, if only still cautiously, and so very late
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in the process: in announcing a five billion dollar lawsuit brought by the City of New York against five petroleum companies; Mayor Bill de Blasio remarked in January 2018: “It’s up to the fossil fuel companies whose greed put us in this position to shoulder the cost of making New York safer and more resilient” (Milman, 2018). Cities and regional governments, including state authorities, have found solace and motivation in the many ways of inventing, financing, and implementing their own new renewable energy investment strategies and projects, perhaps because they are often left to their own devices. Here, a new frontier has opened and new realities have been shaped: urban governance frameworks that in the past seemed less than ideally suited for local energy realities have been informed by effective efficiency campaigns, demand market management, and 100% renewable energy drives. Several cities have been selected for this book because they have modified their administrative and policy apparatuses to advance energy transitions. Both relative veterans such as the City of Aspen in the US state of Colorado, and dynamic newcomers such as Canberra, seat of the Australian capital, teach us about various ways of achieving full renewable energy independence. They stand for countless others, epitomized by the Global Covenant of Mayors, the European Association of Local Authorities in Energy Transition, the renewables drive of the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, C40, and many others. The global transport sector, at the time of writing this introduction, was still more than 95% fossil fuel dependent, as described by Jeff Kenworthy in his new findings on hopeful signs in a system of “glacial” inertia. It undergoes systemic changes from within that promise a rapid late-stage transformation, accelerating exponentially. Industrial references that pale in comparison with the nascent transformation of the transport sector include the rapid replacement of plain-old-telephony by multimodal digital
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THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION: CITIES AND REGIONS EMBRACING RENEWABLE ENERGY
services in the late 1980s, or of film and paper based photography and print by digital imaging and graphic media from the 1990s into the early 2000s: explosive, ubiquitous, networked, multi- and trans-modal, manipulated and, at least seemingly so, accessible to all. Momentous emerging transformations may appear as disruption—but are always preceded and prepared by long-evolving technological trends, innovations, and other changes. Yet even if vehicle—bicycle, car, bus, train, and plane—propulsion were on the verge of becoming electric, and even if all cities were to be powered by the sun tomorrow morning, this could not absolve governments, businesses, and communities from two other great immediate responsibilities. The first responsibility is curbing the consumption of scarce, rapidly depleting natural resources; and the second is slowing, even halting, the onset of runaway climate change through a rapid restoration and strengthening of the Earth’s biological capacity to lower atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations through afforestation, wetland, and moorland rebuilding; the transformation of agriculture into a CO2 adsorbing land use. This means also the conversion of all building and material production into a ubiquitous storage project for atmospherically harvested carbon. The lifestyle based dimension of embedded and imported energy consumption is a vast, and yet still largely ignored, challenge in city policies. The experience leading to this volume suggests that due to the lack of public policy attention expended on it, it is also starved of research funds. And the greenhouse gas sequestration in land cover and aquatic systems, but also carbon rich building and infrastructure materials—using carbon pulled from the air—forms part of a vast scientific and industrial domain that has not really touched the day-to-day policy framework or significantly impacted practice perimeters of cities and regions.
These are at once the most hopeful and unnerving times—the kind of times the applicable Chinese proverb calls “rich in opportunities.” The second edition of Urban Energy Transition continues to probe an ominous and forked point in urban and human history: which way will we turn? Will we careen further down fossil fuel alley, a dark and dangerous cul-de-sac in which some governments and major industries still keep their constituents erring about—or indeed escape the carbon cave into the light: embracing cities and regions that prosper under enlightened local, state, and national leadership on their renewable resources, creating both great visions and great value for their communities, businesses, and local and regional environments? Whatever the future holds for us all, this much is certain: cities and regions that are free of fossil and nuclear dependency will not only help slow the global ride into a different climate, but also fare incomparably better socially, economically, and environmentally in the unfolding climate drama.
SYNOPSIS OF THE BOOK AND ITS CHAPTERS Four major themes structure this book— design, technology, finance, and planning. These are themed clusters of current and linked work in the world of urban and regional energy transition, rather than comprehensive treatments of broad topics. These large topics center on aspects essential to city design; on systems and technologies, on finance and investment—and on governance and planning tools. The themes are very broad and chosen for the convenience of entry for the reader, not as a result of scientific precision: these themes flow through many, perhaps most, papers. The 63 authors hail from research centers such as the European Research Academy’s (EURAC) Institute for Renewable Energy, the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), and the Institute for
SYNOPSIS OF THE BOOK AND ITS CHAPTERS
€ Ecological Economic Research (IOW), several exponents of new energy-oriented industries, renewable energy foundations such as the Foundation for Renewable Energy (FREE), and a number of universities, from Curtin University to HafenCity University Hamburg, the Technical University of Delft, Oxford Brookes, and Zhengzhou University. The countries represented by the community of authors are Australia, China, Germany, Ghana, Italy, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Introduction describes the role of cities and regional entities in the global transition to renewable energy. The chapter “Designing the essential city” is a cri de coeur and homage to a missing link: the glaring absence of the great Energy Disruption from mainstream architecture and urban planning curricula as core activity: it focuses on the importance of prioritizing renewable energy transformations in conceptualizing and designing our cities. To set the tone, Peter Newman convincingly frames the many positive signs for the dawn of the renewable city. John Byrne and John Taminiau make the powerful case for cities becoming solar and other renewable energy-based energy sources. The comprehensive range of opportunities for climate responsive neighborhood design in the urban system is framed by Federico Butera, especially for tropical climate regions. A call for a comprehensive renewable energy infrastructure as a means of nurturing vital civic support for Gaza and its wider region is issued by Peter Droege, Sherman Teichman, and Cody Valdes, in a wider, global climate for peace. Anis Radzi powerfully traces findings related to 100% renewable energy districts in two German cities, Frankfurt and Munich, and the opportunities for good governance in guiding it. The extraordinary role of International Building Exhibitions in cities’ and regions’ climate change action is illustrated by Uli Hellweg, while Werner Sobek articulates his practical vision for seeding the electric city with a new
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generation of active houses. Soeren Schoebel proposes various ways of integrating landscape, urban design, and renewable energy transformation. And the new electric highway is envisioned by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Robert Barnstone, highlighting the need for spatial reconciliation through systems integration— and substitution. In the chapter “Systems and Technologies,” Jeff Kenworthy provides fresh findings from comparing public and private transport practices from around the world, while he and Yuan Gao, Peter Newman, and Weixing Gao take a particularly focused look at two Chinese cities, Beijing and Shanghai, to draw conclusions for cities elsewhere. The central importance of energy storage systems and the principles of linking power, heat, mobility, and batteries is laid out by Ingo Stadler and Michael Sterner. Bernd Hirschl uses findings from Berlin to drive home the message that cities can become transformed from energy sinks to regional sources of surplus renewable energy. How to transcend ailing and vibrant retail machines—inner-urban shopping malls—into renewable energy sources, is postulated by Grazia Barchi, Roberto Lollini and David Moser. Two sweeping and intensive glimpses at urban thermal energy follow: Wolfram Sparber, Roberto Fedrizzi and Chiara Dipasquale provide a guide to the thermal city globally; and Julika Weiss, Elisa Dunkelberg, and Bernd Hirschl explore this very topic more systemically from a German view point. The logic and power of photovoltaic as building and city-integrated technology is further explored by David Moser, Marco Lovati, and Laura Maturi. A view from the solar power industry, legislation, and appurtenant lessons from a Southeast Asian city is presented by Jessie Todoc. Energy, water, food, and waste form a systemic nexus in all cities—indeed, the human economy at large—and Steffen Lehmann provides an important spotlight on Southeast Asian cities from a different viewpoint, through the lens of an urban nexus-themed research program.
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SYNOPSIS OF THE BOOK AND ITS CHAPTERS
Investment, Finance, Tariffs, and Value provide the theme for a chapter anchoring the financial dimension of the urban energy transition. Jemma Green, David Martin, and Megan Cojocar focus on the untouched market of activating renewable energy assets in communities through blockchain technology—speaking for an entire class of emerging asset management tools. From the city that is home to Australia’s national government, Canberra, a team of experts describes the use of targeted tariffs, markets, and auctions in recently achieving 100% renewable electricity: Greg Buckman, Dorte Ekelund, Stephen Bygrave, Jon Sibley, and Megan Ward. From the Rocky Mountain Institute, Victor Olgyay and Iain Campbell present their business model for engendering and maintaining renewable energy based urban districts. Bernd Hirschl, Katharina Heinbach, and Steven Salecki track the multiple financial value-added and creation opportunities resulting from local and regional renewable energy transformations. The wider dividend accruing from engaging in focused and determined energy transitions is framed by Adriano Bisello and Daniele Vettorato. There is a fundamental need to disconnect regional economies from fossil fuel contaminated global currencies, and Shann Turnbull outlines a solar strategy to provide fundamental financial stability. The chapter Governance, Community, and Planning contains both general and specific principles, models, and tools of policy and planning for renewable energy-based communities. A broad overview of the governance dimension is provided by Joerg Knieling and Katharina Lange. Joyce McLaren analyzes and narrates the path to 100% renewable power by one of the United States’ pioneering cities; Aspen,
Colorado; and highlights the role of practical governance in achieving this. Two contrasting and complementary views of African cities follow: a governance-aware look at Sub-Saharan African cities by Simon Bawakyillenuo, Mark Olweny, Megan Anderson, and Mark Borchers; and at enablers of progress in South African cities, by Megan Anderson and Mark Borchers. The chapter finally features three in-depth looks at mapping enabled modeling tools and applications: the local and regional GIS scenario mapping model Space Time and Renewables (STAR), as applied to the European four-country region of Lake Constance by Peter Droege, Dieter G. Genske, Ariane Ruff and the model and mapping empowered urban energy master planning approach from the Netherlands, by Andy van den Dobbelsteen, Rob Roggema, Nico Tillie, Siebe Broersma, Michiel Fremouw, and Craig Lee Martin; and a detailed account of an energy use mini-atlas of low-carbon communities in the United Kingdom is provided by Rajat Gupta and Matt Gregg.
References Droege, P., 2006. Renewable City—A Comprehensive Guide to an Urban Revolution. Wiley Academy, Chichester. Milman, O., 2018. NYC plans to divest $5bn from fossil fuel and sue five oil companies. Retrieved on 22 January from: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/10/ new-york-city-plans-to-divest-5bn-from-fossil-fuels-andsue-oil-companies. NOAA, 2018. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Earth Systems Research Laboratory. Retrieved on 22 January 2018 from: https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/ gmd/ccgg/trends/monthly.html. REN21, 2017. Global renewable energy status report 2017. Retrieved on 22 January 2018 from: http://www.ren21. net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/17-8399_GSR_2017_ Full_Report_0621_Opt.pdf.