Impact Funding Resources
The Positive Energy Districts (PED) Transition Pathway (TP) is aimed at supporting the planning, implementation and replication of PEDs throughout Europe. These activities are meant to contribute to the realisation of at least 100 PEDs by 2025. As a concept, the Positive Energy District supports the vision of future urban energy systems, by both optimising energy efficiency and facilitating the generation of renewable energy, from the scale of city districts down to individual buildings. Moreover, urban districts following the PED approach will be able to support the regional or national energy system through the smoothing of energy production peaks, management of demand and facilitating the exchange and storage of energy. The energy transition requires new ways of urban data management and a sensible use of digital tools for both decision-making and operation. In this regard, this topic focuses on exploring and advancing innovations that enhance the planning, monitoring and optimization of PED that, at the same time, are integrated into city-wide decision-making tools and strategies for energy planning. The key challenge within the PED context is to support situation awareness and decision support to various stakeholders, which has to adequately handle an ensemble of distributed data sources (e.g. from various renewable energy appliances) and dynamic and multidirectional data streams (e.g. in the case of V2G). To account for the systemic character of this challenge, novel approaches beyond energy technology development are required that also enable efficient resource and capacity management, and which allow for the adequate management of data protection.
Start Date02 Sep 2024 End Date14 Nov 2024 Funding Resource TypeProposal
Funding ProviderDriving Urban Transition (co-funded by the European Union)
Proposal
Driving Urban Transition (co-funded by the European Union)
The energy transition requires new ways of urban data management and a sensible use of digital tools for both decision-making and operation. In this regard, this topic focuses on exploring and advancing innovations that enhance the planning, monitoring and optimization of PED that, at the same time, are integrated into city-wide decision-making tools and strategies for energy planning. The key challenge within the PED context is to support situation awareness and decision support to various stakeholders, which has to adequately handle an ensemble of distributed data sources (e.g. from various renewable energy appliances) and dynamic and multidirectional data streams (e.g. in the case of V2G). To account for the systemic character of this challenge, novel approaches beyond energy technology development are required that also enable efficient resource and capacity management, and which allow for the adequate management of data protection.
Decision-making in the context of positive energy districts needs to rely on valid and comprehensive data on different aggregation levels (from household level upwards) from both the digital and the physical infrastructure. The investigation and demonstration of novel digital urban data management solutions that account for heterogenous data sources and data processing requirements, decentralized data governance and multifaceted stakeholder interests of PED is therefore of central importance. In order to enable more strategic decision-making by urban authorities on both the neighborhood and city level, approaches based on micro-level data available at city-scale as well as data harmonization efforts are necessary to better integrate energy planning and spatial planning. Digital tools for the energy transition not only need to effectively cover cross-sector data collection, data management and monitoring, but they should also enable the modelling of impact. A major requirement for succeeding with this is to interweave technology-related data with socio-economic and behavioral data of end-users, as well as administrative data in order to ensure people-oriented solutions in any given urban setting. Investigations towards this objective should identify the potentials and reflect on the constraints of emerging technology, such as artificial intelligence, in order to provide guidelines for their application for PED data management and decision support.
Project proposals submitted under this topic should address one or several of the following issues:
• What are the needs and gaps in terms of data availability for PED for different stakeholder groups? What are the needs and gaps in terms of city-wide data availability?
• What are the needs and gaps in terms of data management and processes (e.g. access, updating, quality management, harmonization, interoperability, linkage etc.) for PED on neighborhood/district levels and city-level? Which principles and approaches should be considered for data governance of PED, including data privacy management and data security?
• How should data management approaches be made transparent, aligned and linked between PED and to other parts of urban energy systems, on a local, regional, national and international scale?
• How can data be exchanged and shared across different institutional boundaries, such as end-user communities, utilities, city governments, businesses and other actors?
• How can cross-sectoral data collection and management (energy, resource flows, mobility, etc.) be organised?
• How should the human interface of PED data management, monitoring and optimization systems be designed to support various types of users?
• What are the potentials and constraints of novel technology trends, such as artificial intelligence, as a means for improving decision support in the planning, operation and adaptation of PED?
