JPI Urban Europe/NSFC: Socio-Techno-Economic Pathways for sustainable Urban energy develoPment

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.

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.