JPI Urban Europe/NSFC: Socio-Techno-Economic Pathways for sustainable Urban energy develoPment
Lead Research Organisation:
Imperial College London
Department Name: Imperial College Business School
Abstract
The rapid urbanisation in developing counties including China has created substantial environmental and social problems. In the EU, cities accommodate over 70% of the population and urban systems face similar challenges and must deal with a strong built-in inertia within physical, regulatory and societal infrastructure that makes the transition to sustainable development challenging. Sustainable urban development in the context of economic transformation and climate change needs to be underpinned by the transformation of urban energy systems. The fundamental question is what is the optimal structure for an efficient, clean and resilient urban energy system? The design and operation of sustainable urban energy system is a complex task, since it relies not only on technology innovation, but also on policy making, market design and business cases. The fast electrification and digitalization of urban system leads to close links among multiple sectors, both positively and negatively. At the same time, the successful urban energy transformation cannot be achieved in an isolated way. The coordination between cities as well as between the city and the nation is required. Last but not least, as the fundamental element of the urban system, citizens will play a central role in such transformation. By allowing citizens to directly be engaged in creating the solutions, it may lead to a faster and improved acceptance of such services, with end users gaining a greater sense of empowerment and ownership. However, there is lack of quantitative evidence to inform the governing bodies and policy makers to support the citizen-centric approaches.
In this context, this project brings together the experts from the EU and China in economics, social science and engineering to develop a comprehensive assessment framework to investigate the optimal Socio-Techno-Economic pathways towards an efficient, clean and resilient urban energy system. The project covers multiple stakeholders (governing body, enterprises and citizens), multiple sectors (electricity, gas, transport and heating/cooling), multiple spatial levels (national, city and community) and multiple time-scales (long-term planning, short-term operation and real-time control). The focus is to identify the barriers and potential solutions from the technology, market, regulation and policy. Cities in EU and China with distinguished features allow speculating the finding of the research beyond the geographical areas where it is carried out.
In this context, this project brings together the experts from the EU and China in economics, social science and engineering to develop a comprehensive assessment framework to investigate the optimal Socio-Techno-Economic pathways towards an efficient, clean and resilient urban energy system. The project covers multiple stakeholders (governing body, enterprises and citizens), multiple sectors (electricity, gas, transport and heating/cooling), multiple spatial levels (national, city and community) and multiple time-scales (long-term planning, short-term operation and real-time control). The focus is to identify the barriers and potential solutions from the technology, market, regulation and policy. Cities in EU and China with distinguished features allow speculating the finding of the research beyond the geographical areas where it is carried out.
Planned Impact
STEP-UP will provide evidence and a pathway for the sustainable urban energy transformation in cites and deliver methodologies and techniques for enabling multi-stakeholder decision making and business models to facilitate this transition in a cost effective way. The research outputs have the potential for enormous impacts on industry, public authorities, citizens and academia. Importantly the project will do this for cities of different scale and diversity found in both EU and Chinese urban environments. Moreover, cities in China and in the EU can be seen, as paradigmatic respectively of East Asia and of West Europe, which allow speculating that the finding beyond the geographical areas where it is carried out.
Citizens - Citizens will benefit from the generation of roadmaps to scale urban energy transformation projects to deployment sizes making effective impact on cities', local pollution, traffic and quality of the public transit services. Engagement activities will be held to gather citizens and business views throughout the project.
Cities' government agencies (e.g. the Greater London Authority, Suzhou City Authority) As the cities providing the case studies and all committed to using the results of the project there are multiple routes that we have to ensure we can deliver impact. In the EU, London, as a leading innovator in urban energy transformation will provide an ideal showcase for the work. National and international conferences will be used to disseminate the results to global cities interested in urban energy transformation and sustainable development.
Central government agencies (e.g. BEIS and Ministry of Science and Technology (China)) - Utilising the PI's and CI's links to major governmental organisations, it will be ensured that the results of the project, the knowledge gained and the tools developed will be known to them and adopted. Sustainable urban energy system is on the strategic agenda of many government departments. The research in STEP-UP will inform policy of governments.
Energy industry (e.g. charging infrastructure developers, network operators). The energy infrastructure industries need to know the likely demands on their infrastructures and the business cases and business models to inform on investment in new infrastructure and services. This is the key to sustainable roll-out as if the infrastructure is not in place and adequate the purchasing of smart devices will be hindered. The quantification the project can deliver and the mechanisms to elaborate this to key stakeholders will be crucial. In the example of EVs, Charge point operators such as ZCF and Bollorré and electricity companies such as National Power, UKPN, China State grid and regulators like OFGEM will play a role in engaging with industry as will BEIS.
Academia- The academic sectors that will benefit from the methodological approaches developed in this project include: Research in operation of Multi-energy system in cities - by addressing the optimal coordination mechanisms among alternative energy resources with the enabling ICT infrastructure; Urban infrastructure decision making research - by tackling the challenges of multi-stakeholder decisions in urban projects under uncertainty and projects interdependencies; Operation and business model research in cities - by addressing the challenges in optimizing the environmental and economical operational performances of energy systems, by exploiting demand flexibility; Urban energy demand modelling research - developing activity-driven approach for demand forecasting across multi-spatial, multi-temporal and multi-sector utilizing the data of sensor networks from energy, mobile and transportation system; and Intelligent city research - by studying application of ICT for operational performance improvement of integrated urban system.
Citizens - Citizens will benefit from the generation of roadmaps to scale urban energy transformation projects to deployment sizes making effective impact on cities', local pollution, traffic and quality of the public transit services. Engagement activities will be held to gather citizens and business views throughout the project.
Cities' government agencies (e.g. the Greater London Authority, Suzhou City Authority) As the cities providing the case studies and all committed to using the results of the project there are multiple routes that we have to ensure we can deliver impact. In the EU, London, as a leading innovator in urban energy transformation will provide an ideal showcase for the work. National and international conferences will be used to disseminate the results to global cities interested in urban energy transformation and sustainable development.
Central government agencies (e.g. BEIS and Ministry of Science and Technology (China)) - Utilising the PI's and CI's links to major governmental organisations, it will be ensured that the results of the project, the knowledge gained and the tools developed will be known to them and adopted. Sustainable urban energy system is on the strategic agenda of many government departments. The research in STEP-UP will inform policy of governments.
Energy industry (e.g. charging infrastructure developers, network operators). The energy infrastructure industries need to know the likely demands on their infrastructures and the business cases and business models to inform on investment in new infrastructure and services. This is the key to sustainable roll-out as if the infrastructure is not in place and adequate the purchasing of smart devices will be hindered. The quantification the project can deliver and the mechanisms to elaborate this to key stakeholders will be crucial. In the example of EVs, Charge point operators such as ZCF and Bollorré and electricity companies such as National Power, UKPN, China State grid and regulators like OFGEM will play a role in engaging with industry as will BEIS.
Academia- The academic sectors that will benefit from the methodological approaches developed in this project include: Research in operation of Multi-energy system in cities - by addressing the optimal coordination mechanisms among alternative energy resources with the enabling ICT infrastructure; Urban infrastructure decision making research - by tackling the challenges of multi-stakeholder decisions in urban projects under uncertainty and projects interdependencies; Operation and business model research in cities - by addressing the challenges in optimizing the environmental and economical operational performances of energy systems, by exploiting demand flexibility; Urban energy demand modelling research - developing activity-driven approach for demand forecasting across multi-spatial, multi-temporal and multi-sector utilizing the data of sensor networks from energy, mobile and transportation system; and Intelligent city research - by studying application of ICT for operational performance improvement of integrated urban system.
Publications
Wang H
(2023)
An Efficient LP-Based Approach for Spatial-Temporal Coordination of Electric Vehicles in Electricity-Transportation Nexus
in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
Dong Z
(2021)
An iterative algorithm for regret minimization in flexible demand scheduling problems
in Advanced Control for Applications
Luo J
(2020)
An optimal modal coordination strategy based on modal superposition theory to mitigate low frequency oscillation in FCWG penetrated power systems
in International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems
Wang Y
(2023)
Coordinated Electric Vehicle Active and Reactive Power Control for Active Distribution Networks
in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
Pan G
(2021)
Cost and low-carbon competitiveness of electrolytic hydrogen in China
in Energy & Environmental Science
Higgins M
(2022)
Cyber-physical risk assessment for false data injection attacks considering moving target defences Best practice application of respective cyber and physical reinforcement assets to defend against FDI attacks
in International Journal of Information Security
Ge P
(2023)
Cyber-Resilient Self-Triggered Distributed Control of Networked Microgrids Against Multi-Layer DoS Attacks
in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid
Strbac G
(2021)
Decarbonization of Electricity Systems in Europe: Market Design Challenges
in IEEE Power and Energy Magazine
Higgins M
(2021)
Enhanced cyber-physical security using attack-resistant cyber nodes and event-triggered moving target defence
in IET Cyber-Physical Systems: Theory & Applications
Ge P
(2020)
Event-triggered distributed model predictive control for resilient voltage control of an islanded microgrid
in International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control
Chu Z
(2021)
Frequency-Constrained Resilient Scheduling of Microgrid: A Distributionally Robust Approach
in IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid
Shen F
(2020)
Hierarchical service restoration scheme for active distribution networks based on ADMM
in International Journal of Electrical Power & Energy Systems
Qiu D
(2022)
Hybrid Multiagent Reinforcement Learning for Electric Vehicle Resilience Control Towards a Low-Carbon Transition
in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
Chai Y
(2020)
Investment decision optimization for distribution network planning with correlation constraint
in International Transactions on Electrical Energy Systems
Zhang Z
(2020)
Modeling Frequency Dynamics in Unit Commitment With a High Share of Renewable Energy
in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
Aunedi M
(2020)
Modelling of national and local interactions between heat and electricity networks in low-carbon energy systems
in Applied Energy
Wang Y
(2022)
Multi-agent deep reinforcement learning for resilience-driven routing and scheduling of mobile energy storage systems
in Applied Energy
Ge P
(2021)
Resilient Secondary Voltage Control of Islanded Microgrids: An ESKBF-Based Distributed Fast Terminal Sliding Mode Control Approach
in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
Bugaje A
(2021)
Selecting decision trees for power system security assessment
in Energy and AI
Lee W
(2020)
Special Issue on Advanced Approaches and Applications for Electric Vehicle Charging Demand Management
in IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications
Higgins M
(2021)
Stealthy MTD Against Unsupervised Learning-Based Blind FDI Attacks in Power Systems
in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Teng F
(2020)
Technical Review on Advanced Approaches for Electric Vehicle Charging Demand Management, Part I: Applications in Electric Power Market and Renewable Energy Integration
in IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications
Ding Z
(2020)
Technical Review on Advanced Approaches for Electric Vehicle Charging Demand Management, Part II: Applications in Transportation System Coordination and Infrastructure Planning
in IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications
Wang Y
(2024)
Towards Microgrid Resilience Enhancement via Mobile Power Sources and Repair Crews: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach
in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
Chu Z
(2020)
Towards Optimal System Scheduling With Synthetic Inertia Provision From Wind Turbines
in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems
Description | We have published a paper on the interactions between heat and electricity networks, at local and national scales. We have calculated that making London's energy system more flexible (through demand response and similar measures) could save £1.5 billion a year (2021 prices) by 2050. One-third of the benefit would come from lower network reinforcement costs within London, while two-thirds would be obtained through cost savings elsewhere; mechanisms for incentivising and sharing these savings are a topic for further research. |
Exploitation Route | Ofgem (the energy regulator) should take these findings into account when designing regulation for the gas and electricity networks, ensuring that distribution companies are given suitable incentives to make investments that bring benefits mainly to the wider system outside their area. |
Sectors | Energy |