Future Energy Decision Making for Cities - Can Complexity Science Rise to the Challenge?

该提案解决了能源可持续性的一个关键挑战-从现在到2020年，各个城市如何在实施雄心勃勃的未来英国能源可持续性政策中发挥重要作用，同时减轻与地方政府决策的冲突？由于英国的城市人口和商业/工业/机构基础，城市对英国的能源可持续性产生了巨大的影响，无论是好是坏。绝大多数英国城市传统上认为能源是别人的问题。因此，城市不仅要迎头赶上，而且还缺乏将能源可持续性纳入其规划进程核心所需的知识、经验和工具。城市现在发现自己处于一个必须做出重大未来能源决策的位置，而这些决策是他们没有能力做出的，总的来说，这将对英国能源可持续性和经济竞争力的未来产生巨大影响。在逐个城市的基础上开发能源规划工具不符合成本效益。同样，使用针对城市的工具包将是早日和广泛采用不断演变的最佳做法以实现国家能源可持续性目标的主要障碍。然而，英国有近70个城市，这些城市彼此之间存在明显差异，内部也不均匀。因此，在城市一级对这个问题进行建模和分析是必不可少的，如果我们要在这个层面实现未来的能源可持续性，就必须以一种适应性强、真正适用于任何英国城市的方式进行。我们已经组建了一个高技能和跨学科的项目团队，准备好并能够与我们的合作伙伴利兹市，奥雅纳和白色，年轻，绿色密切合作来应对这一挑战。我们应对挑战的愿景是部署复杂性科学的工具来提供模型，使城市能够定义其当前的能源状况，然后在未来的能源规划中做出平衡的决策，实现英国的可持续发展目标。为什么会有这样的愿景？复杂性科学的令人兴奋的发展迄今尚未应用于城市级能源未来建模的问题，包括技术和人类/组织方面，特别是它们的相互作用。该提案研究了一种新颖的、基于复杂性科学的方法的可行性，以填补城市规划传统功能之间的空白，能源不是城市规划的重点，城市需要通过未来的能源规划来实现雄心勃勃的英国碳减排目标。该项目的目标是，通过复杂性科学的应用，为城市提供制定灵活和响应性能源政策的方法，这些政策包括：1）不断发展的国家能源政策所设定的总体范围和目标; 2）多种能源选择的供应，例如依赖国家电网而不是分布式发电; 3）最后几公里升级配电的挑战; 4）影响地方一级能源需求，发电和分配的心理和组织因素; 5）现有能源系统锁定在已建成的基础设施中; 6）多个利益相关者的高度分散的决策; 7）为计划外的，不可预测的外部扰动做好准备，在某些情况下是大规模的; 8）未来扩展的潜力，以将能源与其他具有冲突目标的规划优先事项相结合。

This proposal addresses a key challenge for energy sustainability - how can individual cities play their vital role in the implementation of ambitious future UK energy sustainability policies between now and 2020, whilst mitigating conflicts with the local imperatives that until now have dominated local government decision making? With the UK's heavily urban population and commercial/industrial/institutional base, cities have a huge impact, for good or ill, on UK energy sustainability. The vast majority of UK cities have traditionally regarded energy as somebody else's problem. Hence cities not only have a lot of catching up to do but are also lacking in the knowledge, experience and tools needed to integrate energy sustainability into the core of their planning processes. Cities now find themselves in a position of having to make major future energy decisions which they are not equipped for and which, in aggregate, will have a huge impact on the future of the UK's energy sustainability and economic competitiveness. Developing energy planning tools on a city by city basis would not be cost-effective. Equally, the use of city specific toolkits would be a major barrier to the early and widespread adoption of evolving best practices for meeting national energy sustainability targets. However, there are nearly 70 cities in the UK and these differ markedly from each other and are internally inhomogeneous. Thus, modelling and analysing this problem at the city level is both essential and must be performed in a fashion that is adaptable enough to be truly applicable to any UK city, if we are to enable future energy sustainability at this level. We have assembled a highly skilled and interdisciplinary project team that is ready and able to tackle this challenge in close collaboration with our partners the City of Leeds, Arup and White, Young, Green.Our vision in response to the challenge is to deploy the tools of complexity science to deliver models that enable cities to define their current energy situation and then reach balanced decisions in their future energy planning, implementing UK sustainability targets. Why this vision? The exciting developments in complexity science have not thus far been applied to the problem of modelling city level energy futures, incorporating both technology and human/organisational aspects and especially their interactions. This proposal investigates the feasibility of a novel, complexity science based approach to filling the void between the traditional functions of city planning, for which energy has not been the focus and the need for cities to implement the ambitious UK carbon reduction targets through their future energy planning. The proposed research has the potential to enable cities across the UK to deliver their vital contribution to overall UK energy sustainability.The goals of the project are, through the application of complexity science, to provide cities with the means for developing flexible and responsive energy policies that incorporate the following: 1) the overall scope and targets set by evolving national energy policies; 2) the supply of multiple energy options, such as reliance on the national grid versus distributed power generation; 3) the challenge of the last few km of upgraded power distribution; 4) psychological and organisational factors influencing energy demand, generation and distribution at the local level; 5) lock in of existing energy systems in the built infrastructure; 6) highly distributed decision making by multiple stakeholders; 7) provision for unplanned, unpredictable external perturbations, in some cases of large magnitude; 8) potential for future expansion to integrate energy with other planning priorities with conflicting objectives.