EURA 2023 – Early-bird registration EXTENSION
28/02/2023
EURA Working Group on Urban Regeneration – Call for membership
07/03/2023
Conversation #51
New perspectives for energy in cities.
Decarbonization, Decentralization and Digitalization (3D)
by Numan Yanar
Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, Korea
We will not be able to avoid a climate crisis without an energy transition, and cities are key areas of focus in these transitions. According to UN Habitat, urban areas consume 75% of total energy consumption and are responsible for around 70% of the greenhouse gas emissions (UN Habitat, 2021).
This is because all major urban infrastructures are highly energy-dependent: water supply, treatment and waste water disposal, transportation and communication infrastructures, intricate webs of food and material supply, waste disposal, and energy supply itself. In short: cities are heavily dependent on energy. In order to meet such massive requirement, especially after the industrial revolution, cities have been built in a way that energy dependency has steeply increased by being largely dependent on fossil fuels such as coal, natural gas and oil (Rutherford & Coutard, 2014). In addition to the effects on the acceleration of climate change, the combustion of fossil fuels has a variety of negative consequences for the planet, including increased urban air pollution, and acid rain that harms forests and agriculture.
Faced with such a pressing threat for the planet, the requirement of a transition to sustainable, resilient and uninterrupted energy sources for minimizing carbon footprint has emerged. Different countries and cities have adapted their energy policies to achieve their sustainable and smart energy development goals. A paradigm that best represents this evolution in urban energy policies is encapsulated in the ‘3D’ concept, that stands for decentralization, decarbonization, and digitization (Di Silvestre, Favuzza, Sanseverino, & Zizzo, 2018).
With regard to decarbonization, worldwide setting of the goals have been firstly introduced in 2015 with COP21 in Paris. COP22 in Marrakech in 2016, called “the COP of the action”, has led a practical way for the implication of the Paris COP21 agreement (Ghezloun, Saidane, & Merabet, 2017). The focus of COP21 was primarily on climate change and its primary cause: human-caused Green House Gases (GHG) emissions. It resulted in initiatives to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius in this century and to catalyze efforts to prevent temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels through a transition to renewable energy sources (UNDP, 2015).
The critical issue here is how achievable these goals are, especially given industrial energy requirements. Industries require continuous energy supply, and renewable energy sources cannot at present produce continuous energy as they are mostly dependent on solar, wind, hydro and biomass sources. Since these sources cannot produce adequate and continuous energy, governments around the world include nuclear energy in their decarbonization goals. At this point, can we really call nuclear as a green energy source for decarbonization even though the operation process itself is zero-emission? If we consider the uranium extraction and processing, and the removal of side products, it is absolutely not.
Decarbonization alone has critical issues to succeed, especially when industries are considered. However, with the assistance of decentralization, decarbonization can be complemented with renewable energy sources for small scales such as households or small businesses, not so affected by the power shortages as industrial activities. In this case, decentralization in power systems refers to the readiness to generate and manage electricity near to load centers via distributed generators connected to the electric networks. Decentralization is doable, and it is the most promising way to succeed decarbonized energy. However, in such transition, strict regulations for decentralized energy should be applied in order to limit using fossil fuels.
The use of digitalization, in turn, is important in order to create new revenue and value-creating opportunities for urban energy together with decarbonization and decentralization. Currently, the Internet of Things (IoT), the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and blockchain technologies can be considered as the building blocks of future energy infrastructures. Among these, AI is an important enabler for energy transition: think, for instance, to the role data and sensors can play to predict and control energy use in urban infrastructure or in agriculture. While AI has a far higher potential to expedite the global energy transition, this promise will only be fulfilled with more AI innovation, acceptance, and cooperation across industries (WEF, 2021). Having said that, the critical challenge here is the innovation of infrastructures and its acceptance by the public. Different from the decarbonization and decentralization, it will take time for AI to be trusted by energy stakeholders as its technical issues are still not fully known.
Cities' energy policies have been evolving in order to achieve sustainable, resilient and uninterrupted energy production and consumption. While these evolutions occurred, decentralization, decarbonization, and digitization should take the main role. As discussed above, there are various technical concerns and unknown. Even though, 3D of energy is possible for small scales, industries are the big barriers to consider to succeed it. However, once the technical issues are solved and the concerns are eliminated, new ways to succeed green energy will be possible to through decarbonization, decentralization and digitalization.
References:
Di Silvestre M, (et al.). (2018). How Decarbonization, Digitalization and Decentralization are changing key power infrastructures. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 93, 483-498 Ghezloun A, (et al.). (2017). The COP 22 New commitments in support of the Paris Agreement. Energy Procedia, 119, 10-16 Rutherford, J, (et al.). (2014). Urban Energy Transitions: Places, Processes and Politics of Socio-technical Change. Urban Studies, 51(7), 1353-1377 UNDP. (2016). Goal 7 Affordable and Clean Energy UN Habitat. (2021). UN chief promotes 'enormous' benefits of greener cities WEF. (2021). This is how AI will accelerate the energy transition
The three D concept captures the multi-faceted approach being undertaken by governments at varying scales to achieve net zero, and thereby contribute to mitigating climate change. The blog outlines the opportunities that can be exploited and needed innovations so that decarbonization, decentralization, and digitalization can work in tandem in service of local energy transitions. A few questions come to mind, which I will outline below.
What sectors are ripe for the practice of 3D paradigm in cities? That is, where can we expect the greatest gains from, for example, decarbonization and digitalization; and what needs to happen for these transformations? One sector that comes to mind is urban mobility, which is innovating on the basis of this principle. However, in these discussions it becomes clear that technological innovations are insufficient for realizing the behavioral changes needed for energy transition. Some emphasis must be given also to social innovation and change, see for example reflections around Mobility as a Service.
This connects to my second question which relates to recent discussions around extending the paradigm to a fourth D: decreasing energy use. How can we cut down? This comes at a moment where the issue of energy poverty is gaining increasing interest in some of Europe’s important urban centers. Raising energy efficiency is clearly needed and I wonder if you have any thoughts on how else can we put the three or four D’s into practice while safeguarding and serving the city’s energy poor.
This brings me to the question of energy citizens, who as prosumers may contribute to decentralization and decarbonization in cities. However inclusion and access continue to be contentious issues in local energy. One dimension of this debate that deserves attention is gender. How does this paradigm make space for energy justice, particularly in cities?
It’s really interesting your exchange of ideas about the future of energy transition in our cities.
Numan, thanks for outlining the key concepts are driving the efforts of both public authorities and industry in creating new pathways to decrease the massive amount of non-renewable resources urban areas still draw from the planet. I guess they’re not familiar to all the urban scholars that populate this blog!
And thanks also to you, Le Anh, for raising a couple of questions that, in my opinion, are of key importance in the process of climate change adaptation. Non doubt that transition towards sustainability require also social and behavioural changes to exploit the added value given by the technological innovations so clearly described by Numan. In addition, the benefits of energy transition seems to be increasingly unequal across territories and social classes, to the extent that energy justice has become an emerging topic in the academia – see, for instance, the review from Jenkins et al. (2016).
In other words, I presume that the social dimension of energy transition will be so relevant at least as much as the technological one already is.