Urban Energy Transition: From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Power

663 Pages·2008·12.154 MB·English

by  Peter Droege (ed.)

Urban Energy Transition
From Fossil Fuels to Renewable Power
Edited by
Peter Droege
University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
World Council for Renewable Energy
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Droege, Peter
Urban energy transition: form fossil fuels to renewable power
1. Cities and towns- Energy consumption 2. Greenhouse gas mitigation 3. Greenhouse gas mitigation
Government policy 4. City and town life- Environmental aspects 5. City planning- Environmental aspects
I. Title
333.7'9'091732
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2007941706
ISBN: 978-0-08-045341-5
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Cover design by Peter Droege
About the cover image: overall household energy requirement in Greater Sydney and surrounding local
government areas, scaled from red, at 270 Gigajoules per person a year, to green, at 150 G]. The map represents
energy used in households directly as well as energy embodied in goods and services consumed. It roughly cor
relates with income and Lifestyle, and socio-demographic makeup of urban, suburban and rural communities. It
corrects the popular assumption that the denser, central city areas are more energy-wise. As long as commercial
energy is derived primarly from fossil-fuel combustion big city life also represents the highest source of green
house gas emissions in geographic terms. Map generated by Chris Dey for the chapter 'Direct versus embodied euergy
the ueed for urban lifestyle trnusitions' by Manfred Lenzen, Richard Wood and Bamey Foran.
With gratitude to the Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) for its assistance in
developing this volume.
Contents
Urban Energy Transition: An Introduction 1
Peter Droege
PART I Principles and Drivers
1 Solar City: Reconnecting Energy Generation and Use to the Technical
and Social Logic of Solar Energy 17
Hermann Scheer
2 Undoing Atmospheric Harm: Civil Action to Shrink the Carbon Footprint 27
John Byrne, Lado Kurdgelashvili and Kristen Hughes
3 Urbanization, Increasing Wealth and Energy Transitions: Comparing
Experiences between the USA, Japan and Rapidly Developing
Asia-Pacific Economies 55
Peter f. Marcotullio and Niels B. Schulz
4 Direct versus Embodied Energy-The Need for Urban Lifestyle Transitions 91
Manfred Lenzen, Richard Wood and Barney Foran
5 Energy Development and Sustainable Monetary Systems 121
Shann Turnbull
PART II Policy and Practice Dynamics
6 Renewable Energy Policymaking in New York and London:
Lessons for other 'World Cities'? 143
Stephen A. Hammer
7 Climate Change and Cities: The Making of a Climate Friendly Future 173
Shobhakar Dhaka/
8 City Energy Networking in Europe 193
Marco Keiner and Arley Kim
9 Energy Use and C0 Production in the Urban Passenger Transport
2
Systems of 84 International Cities: Findings and Policy Implications 211
Jeffrey R. Kenworthy
PART III New Aspects of Technology
10 Storage Systems for Reliable Future Power Supply Networks 239
Dirk Uwe Sauer
v
Vl Contents
11 The Media Laboratory City Car: A New Approach to Sustainable
Urban Mobility 267
William J. Mitchell, Ryan Chin and Andres Sevtsuk
12 Towards the Intelligent Grid: A Review of the Literature 283
john Gardner and Peta Ashworth
13 Innovations Promote Rural and Peri-Urban Electrification
in Developing Countries 309
Nancy E. Wimmer
PART IV Transforming the Built Environment
14 Towards the Renewable Built Environment 329
Federico Butera
15 Counteracting Urban Heat Islands in Japan 365
Toshiaki Ic hin ose, Futoshi Matsumoto and Kumi Kataoka
16 Ecodesign and the Transition of the Built Environment 381
Ken Yeang
17 "Energy-Contracting" to Achieve Energy Efficiency and Renewables
using Comprehensive Refurbishment of Buildings as an Example 387
Jan W. Bleyl-Androschin and Daniel Schinnerl
18 Sustainability on the Urban Scale: Green Urbanism-New Models for
Urban Growth and Neighbourhoods 409
Steffen Lehmann
PART V International Urban Agendas
19 Barcelona and the Power of Solar Ordinances: Political Will, Capacity
Building and People's Participation 433
Josep Puig
20 Reducing Carbon Emissions in London: From Theory to Practice 451
A.R. Day, C. Dunham, P.G. jones, L. Hinojosa, A. Dunsdon and P. Ogumka
21 Urban Energy and Carbon Management in Leicester 475
Peter Webber and Paul Fleming
22 Reducing Carbon Emissions From Oxford City: Plans and Tools 491
Rajat Gupta
23 Integrating Energy in Urban Planning in the Philippines and Vietnam 507
Jessie L. Todoc
24 Sustainable Energy Systems and the Urban Poor: Nigeria, Brazil and
the Philippines 533
Joy Clancy, 0/u Maduka and Feri Lumampao
Contents Vll
25 Energy Planning in South African cities 563
Mark Borchers, Megan Euston-Brown and Leila Mahomed
26 Household Markets for Ethanol-Prospects for Ethiopia 585
Erin Laurel/ Boyd
27 Freedom from Fossil Fuel and Nuclear Power: The Scope for Local Solutions
in the United States 619
Tam Hunt
28 Lagos, Nigeria: Sustainable Energy Technologies for an Emerging
African Megacity 631
Richard lngwe, Eugene J. Aniah and Judith Otu
Index 647

Urban Energy Transition: An Introduction
PETER DROEGE
University of Newcastle, Australia
Around the world, cities and urban communities plant the seeds to a great transformation,
unprecedented in history in its reach and magnitude. The growing footprint of contempor-
ary and especially wealthy cities is well documented. Their carbon belching thirst for fossil
fuels, their demand for an ever rising stream of global resources, their contribution to land
clearing, second to fossil fuel combustion in concentrating greenhouse gases in the atmos-
phere – all these conditions are not only painfully understood, but have begun to drive
important shifts in urban energy and environmental policy making. Urban communities in
developing countries confront energy transition challenges that are only superficially dif-
ferent from those of the more industrialized world. Their challenge is to stabilize a grow-
ing hunger for secure energy supplies, avoid polluting and wasteful industries and power
systems, and – not unlike their more developed sisters – shun development directions that
hardwire costly and inefficient mobility patterns for generations to come. Enlightened com-
munity leaders and governments are sharply attuned to the need to enhance human health
and urban livelihood, and construct bridges of access, equity and empowerment. They seek
to nurture more vital and autonomous rural and peri-urban regions, to help reduce and
even deflect migrational pressures, but they also hope to craft new development directions
that radically depart from the congested coal-and-petroleum path that has been blazed by
the economically dominant world, ever since the industrial revolution as referred to by
both Lenzen e t al . and Kenworthy in this book.
Energy, Cities, Evolution and Innovation
Fundamental features in the relation between urban life and energy use are common to
Southern and Northern cities. While urban settlements are often more transport-energy
efficient – i.e. when looking at per capita petroleum energy expended – than suburban or
peri-urban areas, given that nearly all motorized movements are oil based – their overall
energy requirements soar high above those of less urbanized communities as referred to
by both Lenzen e t al . and Kenworthy in this book. Only in this transport sense can cities
rightfully be seen to be more ‘ energy-wise ’ , by affording greater functional densities and
hence more compact, concentrated or combined land-use patterns. Here lies a civilization
challenge that can only be satisfactorily resolved in a combination of efficiency, cultural
innovations and the shift to renewable power. The vitality of cities – their very power as a
cultural concentrator, market, and production-consumption engine – is based on the very
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2 Urban Energy Transition
densities, resulting synergies and serendipitous encounters they engender. Since their rise
in the Bronze Age cities have been central to advanced civilization ’ s conception of cultural
and economic accomplishment and supremacy. As a corollary to their exalted status in
the architecture of post-agrarian societies they also engender far greater levels of energy
consumption when looking at the entire energy requirement spectrum – as described by
Manfred Lenzen and his colleagues in their chapter on urban energy embodiment. This
elevated energy and general resource intensity of urban economies and lifestyles is hence
likely always to have been a basic feature of cities – long resulting in deleterious impacts
on surrounding countryside and forest areas. Yet the great difference today is not merely
the very proliferation of cities against the background of the fossil-fuel charged population
explosion, and not alone the conspicuous and inconspicuous levels in globalized forms of
consumption – but also the basic fact that their overwhelming commercial energy input is
fossil, with all of its devastating consequences.
Positive signals arise from the current global energy conundrum, common to cities in
more and less wealthy regions of the world. The present energy transition triggers a tech-
nological and logistical innovation wave, affecting areas as disparate as personal and pub-
lic transport systems; efficiency in computing, industrial processes and building design;
innovations in facility construction and use; fiscal, funding and investment models; and
in renewable energy generation, storage and management itself. This wave has reinforced
many governments in their nascent forms of action, and mobilized business leaders in ven-
ture capital finance, equity funds and infrastructure investment across Europe, India, China
or the United States – yielding many new companies and a net growth in jobs and flow-
on in economic benefits. Yet despite numerous and clear signals of progress and advance
into new and sustainable directions of development, the folklore of traditional international
energy policy has it that this type of innovation is too expensive or otherwise beyond reach
of the developing world. Such statements risk being read as promoting outmoded infra-
structures, rather than as genuine concern for improving the livelihood of the poor. Why
should the developing world not avail itself of locally sourced, unlimited, non-polluting
and income generating means of indigenous renewable energy generation – rather than fall
into the trap of antiquated models of electricity supply that are cheap only because their
external costs have been discounted, they are heavily subsidised, or both?
A fresh generation of urban community leaders embraces new – and newly rediscovered –
approaches to city planning and design, with local energy liberation in both developing and
developed parts of the world in mind. Supported by experts, leading businesses and inter-
national networks they move to bring about a range of related community development,
production and consumption level and other economic changes of particular significance to
life in cities, city regions and states. To be sure: earlier urban energy technology transitions
have been dramatic, too – and none more so than the rapid, epic spread of coal and oil com-
bustion that underpinned urban development as we know it, from the late eighteenth, dur-
ing the nineteenth and especially throughout the twentieth centuries, yielding our present
resource and climate predicaments. Over a short time span this massive, complex energy
revolution spawned global electrification, the meteoric rise of motors and machines and the
very age of mechanization and automation they represent, of telecommunications and petro-
leum, coal and gas powered transport on the ground, across the seas and through the air. All
these innovations helped boost the primacy and spread of cities, and of urban economies
and their inordinately energy-draining lifestyles.
The currently commencing energy transition is different. For one, a far greater level of
collective consciousness underpins it: today ’ s future choices seem clearer to us than what
they were to observers and decision-makers one or two centuries ago. The need to change
direction is more widely appreciated today than during earlier times, driven by manifest
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Urban Energy Transition: An Introduction 3
constraints as much as new opportunities. Our recent, fossil-fuel charged past was accom-
panied by extraordinary futurist visions – the delirious genre of the cities-of-tomorrow, par-
ticularly powerful during the first half of the twentieth century. Machine inspired mirages
of modern things-to-come projected grand futures and dazzled champions of urban change.
Yet in this very pursuit advanced civilizations stumbled into a new global reality few dared
to fathom or reflect on. The implications of change did not reach public policy discourse until
at least half a century after the great fossil-fuelled growth visions began to enthral, inspir-
ing aspirations of ever-rising prosperity around the world. It was only in the 1970s when
the global urbanization wave became too massive to ignore, and the unpleasant prospect of
a sprawling, crumbling civilization started to seriously spoil the view of future horizons –
the very time when the first oil supply shock hit, more than a decade after the inevitable oil
decline had first been mooted by an industry insider ( Droege 2006 ). Fears over the looming
climate catastrophe had been publicly expressed for a full decade longer: for instance, in the
proto-Gore educational film produced by Frank Capra for Bell Labs, T he Unchained Goddess
( Capra and Hurtz 1958 ). Yet, even in these very moments of lucidity the link between the
worldwide energy revolution driving progress throughout the twentieth century, the trig-
gering of an unprecedented population explosion, the unfolding global urban reality and
the stability of the planet ’ s ecosystem had not been appreciated. Since that time, future
urban development scenarios have become much more tangible, and unnervingly so.
New Perspectives: Lifting the Gaze from the Ground Below
This transition also differs in its philosophical and scientific outlooks, and in its very para-
digms of progress. The all-consuming preoccupation with fossil and nuclear energy is rooted
in the spirit of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the popular obsession with
the rising science of geology, the great new frontier of that era, caricatured so succinctly by
Bill Bryson in his S hort History of Nearly Everything ( Bryson 2003 ). The intensive study of
underground rock formations triggered a massive, mole-like pursuit of mineral mining. The
nineteenth century still rules: mining very much colours mainstream discourse on energy
today: oil wells, uranium deposits, coal seams describe sources of ‘ our energy ’ . And, within
this family of historical and philosophical affinities, methane hydrate, oil shale and tar sands
are frequently presented as ‘ new ’ energy resources – a sad irony since they only represent
the fading days of the golden age of energy mining, and the inexor-able end of the fossil
incineration age. In anticipation of the inevitable, calls for clamping down on the global
resource conflagration have grown more agitated. Advanced renewable energy systems are
finally beginning to be pursued on a global scale. Their deployment is vastly different from
the mining and processing of combustible carbonic carcasses. In almost all its guises renew-
able power is stellar in nature: derived from our own star, the Sun. At the closest distance of
146 million kilometres it projects enough power to heat the entire surface and atmosphere of
our planet by 300 degrees Celsius (C), that is, from 0 degree kelvin (K) to some 18 degrees
C – and rising. It gives rise to plant and animal life. It drives the worldwide water cycle
and causes atmospheric air masses to shift at a global scale. It has been calculated that wind
power alone – gauged at a height of some 80 metres and counting only those 13% of calcula-
tion points yielding good wind speeds – is capable of generating some five to eight times the
electricity now generated by all commercial sources combined ( Archer and Jacobson 2005 ).
Structural Differences Between Non-Renewable and Renewable Power Systems
Direct renewable energy sources – such as sunshine, wind, water and wave flow, or the
cycles of ebb and tide – are freely available and hence not tradable commodities until
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