22 September 2021
Viktoria Hotel
Europe/Oslo timezone

The many faces of Positive Energy Districts – scope, boundaries and benchmarks

22 Sep 2021, 12:30
20m
Viktoria Hotel

Viktoria Hotel

Skansegata 1, 4006 Stavanger
Positive Energy Districts as vehicle towards smart and sustainable cities Parallel session 2

Speaker

Dr Renée Heller (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences)

Description

Positive Energy Districts (PED) are increasing getting attention as an instrument towards climate neutral, smart and inclusive cities. There is much ongoing debate on how to set the scope, boundaries and benchmarks of PEDs. For many local project partners this is confusing. This discussion could be structured by differentiating between four main perspectives from which a PED could be scoped, delineated and benchmarks could be set. These perspectives serve different research and innovation questions and bring different insights for replication and city planners.

  1. Climate change mitigation serves a global goal. After effort sharing to individual countries, national mitigation targets are adopted for sectors and regions. PEDs targets can only be set after optimalisation mitigation in a broader regional and cross sectoral context.

  2. PEDs are often driven by local initiatives; either by citizens, local entrepreneurs or local project developers. They can set their own objectives and targets for their neighborhood, which may not be the same as from an optimised mitigation perspective.

  3. PEDs provide a context and eco-system for research and innovation, for instance on smart grids, local energy markets and communities. For effective R&I, the specific innovations require a specific scope.

  4. Finally, individual components of a PEDs are subject to different policy and regulatory regimes, such as building codes, with different accountability structures and scopes. This leads to a complex process in benchmarking the PED performance.

In our contribution, we will illustrate the different perspectives for a selection of PED demonstrators, including in Amsterdam.

GDPR complianced Yes
I am willing and able to travel to Norway unless Covid-19 restrictions prevent me from traveling to Stavanger. YES

Primary authors

Dr Renée Heller (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) Mr Mark van Wees (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.