Integrative Energy Planning

What is it about?

‘Energy planning‘ refers primarily to the planning of grid-bound energy supply such as heating and cooling as well as electricity. ‘Integrative energy planning‘ names the integration of energy aspects into the urban design and planning processes, where supply side and demand side are looked at together from the very early stage, involving relevant parties as early as possible and where also infrastructure is looked at in an integrative way to ensure the realisation of neighbourhoods with far higher energy efficiency and energy production standards than currently without diminishing flexibility for its inhabitants.

Many cities, including the participating ones, have already started ambitious large-scale urban (re-) development projects, such as Vienna‘s Seestadt Aspern, Berlin‘s Adlershof, Stockholm‘s Royal Sea Port or Amsterdam‘s Houthaven, and gathered first experience in designing and planning urban (re-)developments.

The idea was to dedicate time and resources for consolidating the learning from these projects, harvest the experiences and upgrade them through collective learning and co-creation of knowledge into concrete, upgraded administrative practices for integrative energy design and planning of urban areas. With its results this project should make a major contribution to master the challenge of planning and launching many ambitious large-scale urban development projects over the next 10-20 years as efficient and effective as possible.

As the challenge is common for many European cities knowledge pooling and sharing at European level in a joint EU project was the appropriate extra incentive. It was a particular European added value to learn better, faster and cheaper by learning across cities.