Objectives

 As results the project aims to:

• involve key stakeholders for significantly increasing the dialogue and common understanding (city administration, utility, developers) on integrative urban energy planning in view of new societal, organisational and technological challenges
• enhance the institutional capacity of administrations of leading European cities to plan urban (re-) development areas in an integrated manner – impacting directly on (re-) development areas for around about 3 million of inhabitants in the next 20 years
• improved planning coordination between the city and infrastructure providers and energy suppliers
• create lasting structures for necessary exchange between the key stakeholders in the participating cities
• condense important best practices and insights from experiences in the participating cities
• facilitate active learning by providing expertise to cities and transfer knowledge and models for replication

Improved governance structures

Improving a governance process will generally first need investment (staff resources and time), while the benefits will become apparent only later. For the governance process on integrative urban energy planning a special effort is needed as bridges need to be established between urban planners and energy planners in the city administration and with energy infrastructure planners outside the city administration. Hence, extra incentives are needed.

To overcome routines and habits and to find into a new role dedicated time and resources are needed. It is crucial to establish a trust building dialogue among the involved parties. Only this allows achieving the necessary collective learning and capacity building, to arrive at a comprehensive picture of possible technical, organisational and administrative options, including concrete and practical models for how to work together and manage such governance processes step-by-step.

Energy impacts

URBAN LEARNING  expects significant energy impacts:

For the expected three million new inhabitants to be accommodated within the next 20 years in the participating cities, it is expected that better governance of integrative urban energy planning can result in energy savings of at least 1.700 GWh/a:

• Reduction of primary energy consumption for heat (buildings): > 500 GWh/a
• Reduction of primary energy consumption for mobility: > 1,200 GWh/a

Additionally, an increase of renewable energy production of at least 2.000 GWh/a is expected. With the expected reach-out to other cities this impact will be even higher. Better governance processes will also bring considerable savings in costs and time for the city administrations.

As the key outcomes of the project are improved governance processes for urban planning, the immediate energy impacts can only be very low but will become very significant over time. As planning processes take quite long time from initial master plans to the final construction and refurbishment work, the underlying horizon used for estimating energy impacts is 20 years.