Integrated Urban Energy Systems: Focus on Real World Applications

Dear Colleagues,

Rapid urbanization is creating substantial opportunities and challenges across the world. The United Nations projects that by 2050, two thirds of the global population will live in urban areas. While cities foster innovation, wealth, and other benefits, the current pace of urbanization may aggravate already mounting economic, social and environmental challenges faced by urban settings.

This context also creates opportunities and challenges for the energy system. The increasing localized demand for electric and thermal energy must be accompanied by a more efficient and reliable power grid, as well as by larger penetrations of clean distributed energy resources (DER). The latter will introduce further technical challenges, such as generation output intermittency and shifting of energy loads, which must be managed at the distribution network level using supplemental technologies, such as advanced power electronics, energy storage, and monitoring, control and digitization technologies. At the same time, cities must incorporate smart energy management at the customer level to enable demand response, unlocking greater power system flexibility and increasing electric grid resilience. To a significant extent, human-inspired machine learning methods will support these goals, capitalizing on vast amounts of data already being ubiquitously generated. Lastly, new approaches must be adopted to achieve superior resource efficiency, by integrating different interchangeable energy forms (heating, cooling, electricity) and energy vectors (gas, hydrogen, water) within various industry sectors (for instance waste, or transportation via adoption of electric vehicles).

As early adopters of the above technologies, individual customers and local energy communities will play a crucial role in this transformation. Furthermore, user-centric energy innovation will drive novel attractive business cases, allowing for their active and cost-effective participation in the stable, reliable, and secure operations of the clean energy system.

This Special Issue is welcoming contributions depicting the technical, economic, and policy complexities of integrated urban energy systems, especially (but not exclusively), at the small city, urban district, or neighbourhood scale. It intends to act as a forum for academic institutions, industry, city authorities, non-profits, or other types of organizations to showcase results from real-world demonstration or commercial projects, as well as from applied research.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

1. Technical design, control, and planning analyses integrating different components of urban energy systems, supported by optimization methods and/or modeling tools;
2. Multi-level strategies for urban resiliency and decarbonization;
3. State-of-the-art technology studies based on real-world testing and/or demonstration;
4. Cost-benefit analyses and life cycle assessments of technologies and systems;
5. Cutting-edge technology policy and regulatory framework studies;
6. Foresight and future scenario analyses supported by appropriate modeling tools;
7. Demand response and customer behaviour studies;
8. Techno-economic modeling analyses depicting novel business models for flexibility exploitation, ancillary market participation, or peer-to-peer customer interactions;
9. Data-driven system modelling and analysis supported by artificial intelligence methods.

Dr. Gonçalo Mendes
Dr. Thomas Deetjen
Dr. Tao Xu
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• Urban energy systems
• Distributed energy resources
• Energy systems integration
• Multi-vector energy coordination
• Demand side management
• Grid resilience
• Artificial intelligence
• Business models
• Small cities and districts
• Real-world applications