Quantifying urban energy potentials: Presenting three european research projects

Although more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, this trend is expected to continue and there is an increasing awareness of the need to move to a fully sustainable urban energy system, this transition process is still significantly lagging behind in many places. The yield of many renewable energy sources is directly related to the surface available for deployment. Because of this and the high density of cities, urban planners face the difficult challenge of incorporating energy based planning in their practices. The TU Delft method of Energy Potential Mapping provides the means to spatially quantify energy demand and renewable supply in the built environment in a unified way. This paper presents three current research projects that apply the EPM method in European cities: CELSIUS (smart District Heating and Cooling), City-zen (urban transition strategies) and PLANHEAT (urban DHC planning toolset).