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

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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.