scholarly journals Enabling Public Participation in Shaping the Inclusive Energy Transition Through Serious Gaming—Case Studies in India

Author(s):  
Bharath M. Palavalli ◽  
Sruthi Krishnan ◽  
Yashwin Iddya

AbstractTo create holistic plans for equitable access to energy and to create sustainable transition pathways, stakeholder consultation and engagement processes are essential. In India, the planning process for energy has challenges that range from legacy processes, increasing energy demand to fuel growth, pressures arising from competing (as well as new and old) technologies, to varying goals for all the stakeholders. We categorize these factors as institutional structures, geopolitical, environmental, technical, social, and monetary factors. To ensure a vision for a collective future and a coherent plan for energy, it is important that the processes enable participation and allow for co-ordination and interaction to strengthen dialogue. Processes should capture intangibles and include slack for events such as pandemics, which are no longer treated either as externalities or once-in-a-lifetime events. In this chapter, we give two examples of serious games as tools to address these challenges in the context of planning. The first example is of a game created for bureaucrats, decision-makers in the government, and private energy companies to plan collectively and compare results from various plans for energy expenditure in India. In the second case, the game aids transportation planning in urban India, which requires additional effort to ensure a transition to equitable access to energy. Using results from the game sessions, we illustrate how such methods can bridge gaps in energy planning in the diverse and challenging context of India.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Torabi Moghadam ◽  
Silvia Coccolo ◽  
Guglielmina Mutani ◽  
Patrizia Lombardi ◽  
Jean Louis Scartezzini ◽  
...  

The spatial visualization is a very useful tool to help decision-makers in the urban planning process to create future energy transition strategies, implementing energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies in the context of sustainable cities. Statistical methods are often used to understand the driving parameters of energy consumption but rarely used to evaluate future urban renovation scenarios. Simulating whole cities using energy demand softwares can be very extensive in terms of computer resources and data collection. A new methodology, using city archetypes is proposed, here, to simulate the energy consumption of urban areas including urban energy planning scenarios. The objective of this paper is to present an innovative solution for the computation and visualization of energy saving at the city scale.The energy demand of cities, as well as the micro-climatic conditions, are calculated by using a simplified 3D model designed as function of the city urban geometrical and physical characteristics. Data are extracted from a GIS database that was used in a previous study. In this paper, we showed how the number of buildings to be simulated can be drastically reduced without affecting the accuracy of the results. This model is then used to evaluate the influence of two set of renovation solutions. The energy consumption are then integrated back in the GIS to identify the areas in the city where refurbishment works are needed more rapidly. The city of Settimo Torinese (Italy) is used as a demonstrator for the proposed methodology, which can be applied to all cities worldwide with limited amount of information.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (23) ◽  
pp. 8165
Author(s):  
Sylwia Mrozowska ◽  
Jan A. Wendt ◽  
Krzysztof Tomaszewski

The ongoing climate changes necessitate an effective climate policy. The energy transition is now an important topic and problem, especially in Poland. (1) The undertaken analysis of the problem of energy transition is important for political, social and technological reasons. Political, because it shows the weakness of the implementation of Polish energy policy in regards to climate change. Social, because energy transition will bring about significant social changes in the largest industrial region of Poland. Technological, as the departure from fossil fuels requires the introduction of other sources of energy on a massive scale, for which Poland is not prepared. The aim of the study was to critically analyse the activities to date in the field of energy transition in Poland. The second goal of the analysis was an attempt to answer the question of whether the process of energy transition and achieving the goals set in the EU’s European Green Deal are possible at all until 2050. (2) To achieve the goals, the system method and the decision-making method were primarily used. These methods allowed for an examination of the main determinants of the Polish energy transformation. (3) The main results include the confirmation, contrary to the announcements of the Polish government, that despite the adoption in Poland of the strategy “Poland’s energy policy until 2040”, the effective implementation of the energy transition before 2050 is not only very difficult, but may even be impossible to implement in the assumed time. This is due to political, economic, social and technological conditions. Coal energy is outdated, expensive and ineffective. Due to natural conditions, wind energy is not able to meet the energy demand of the industry. The development of nuclear energy is only in the planning phase. (4) To sum up, in the next thirty years, Poland will not be able to achieve the assumed effects of the energy transition, which is in contradiction with the official declaration of the government.


Author(s):  
Mohammad Airaj Firdaws Sadiq ◽  
Najib Rahman Sabory ◽  
Mir Sayed Shah Danish ◽  
Tomonobu Senjyu

Afghanistan hosts the Hindu Kush, an extension of the Himalaya mountains that act as water sources for five major rivers flowing through Afghanistan. Most of these rivers provide promise for the construction of water dams and installment of micro hydropower plants (MHP). Although civil war and political strife continue to threaten the country for more than four decades, the Afghan government introduced strategic plans for the development of the country. In 2016 Afghanistan introduced the Afghanistan National Peace and Development (ANPD) Framework at Brussels de-signed to support Afghanistan’s progress towards achieving the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals). This study discussed the 7th Goal (ensuring access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy for all) and 8th Goal (promoting sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all) alignment in Afghanistan. The Afghan gov-ernment acknowledges its responsibility to provide electricity for all of its citizens, but this can only be achieved if the government can secure a reliable source of energy. Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain provides a challenge to build a central energy distribution system. Therefore this study looks for alternative solutions to the energy problems in Afghanistan and explores feasibility of micro-hydropower plant installations in remote areas. This study evaluated socio-economic im-pacts of micro-hydropower plants in the life of average residents. We focused on one example of a micro hydropower plant located in Parwan, conducted interviews with local residents, and gath-ered on-site data. The findings in this study can help policymakers to analyze the effects of devel-opment projects in the social and economic life of residents. It will encourage the government and hopefully the private sector to invest in decentralized energy options, while the country is facing an ever-growing energy demand.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 2241
Author(s):  
Moritz Ehrtmann ◽  
Lars Holstenkamp ◽  
Timon Becker

Community energy actors play an important role in the energy transition, fostering the diffusion of sustainable innovation in the renewable energy market. Because market conditions for business models in the renewable energy sector are changing and feed-in-tariff (FiT) schemes expiring, community energy companies are in the process of innovating their business models. In recent years, several community energy companies in Germany have entered the electricity retail market selling locally generated electricity from their renewable energy installations to customers in their region. We explore the evolving regional electricity business models for community energy companies in Germany, related governance structures, and the role they play for a sustainable energy transition. In order to implement these complex business models, community energy companies cooperate with professional marketing partners (intermediaries), which are capable of taking over the tasks and obligations of electricity suppliers. Through a series of expert interviews and desk research, we identify three distinctive regional electricity business models and examine opportunities and challenges to their implementation. Results show that there are different forms of cooperation, leading to specific governance structures and creating a set of new value propositions. Through these forms of cooperation, business networks emerge, which can function as incubators for sustainable innovation and learning for the post-FiT era.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 500
Author(s):  
Fabrizio Pilo ◽  
Giuditta Pisano ◽  
Simona Ruggeri ◽  
Matteo Troncia

The energy transition for decarbonization requires consumers’ and producers’ active participation to give the power system the necessary flexibility to manage intermittency and non-programmability of renewable energy sources. The accurate knowledge of the energy demand of every single customer is crucial for accurately assessing their potential as flexibility providers. This topic gained terrific input from the widespread deployment of smart meters and the continuous development of data analytics and artificial intelligence. The paper proposes a new technique based on advanced data analytics to analyze the data registered by smart meters to associate to each customer a typical load profile (LP). Different LPs are assigned to low voltage (LV) customers belonging to nominal homogeneous category for overcoming the inaccuracy due to non-existent coincident peaks, arising by the common use of a unique LP per category. The proposed methodology, starting from two large databases, constituted by tens of thousands of customers of different categories, clusters their consumption profiles to define new representative LPs, without a priori preferring a specific clustering technique but using that one that provides better results. The paper also proposes a method for associating the proper LP to new or not monitored customers, considering only few features easily available for the distribution systems operator (DSO).


SAGE Open ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 215824402199455
Author(s):  
Dragana S. Nikolić ◽  
Marijana D. Pantić ◽  
Vesna T. Jokić

The main task of planning documents is to achieve maximal rationality in the use of space, spatial resources, and balanced territorial development. The preparation of plans is regulated by a legislative framework, which embraces multiple phases and stakeholders. In a perfect planning process, it would be expected that all the elements are well coordinated and brought to common understanding, but in reality, obstacles and challenges can occur in any of these steps, especially in the implementation phase. Although a plan is fully prepared to be practiced, its implementation might be omitted. Therefore, this article analyzes the full process of spatial and urban planning from the perspective of plan implementation. The methodology is based on a combination of different data collection methods (interviews, fieldwork, direct observation) with the analysis of plans and the particular mention of those plans that picture the implementation issues the most. Also, legislative acts and semi-annual and annual reports on the achievements of the local government budget are analyzed. The approach indicates that plan implementation depends the most on the willingness of the government to perform changes in the system and to peruse punitive policy comprehensively. Although it is about implementation at the local level, the success primarily depends on clear definitions given in the legislative acts, freedom of the local communities to make their own decisions, and financial decentralization, side by side with the regional and local circumstances, institutional technical and staff capacities, and application of participatory planning that involves actors from various sectors.


2015 ◽  
Vol 725-726 ◽  
pp. 996-1001
Author(s):  
Galina Tokunova ◽  
Alexander Petrov

The increased role of knowledge in the economics, the growth of the role of education and innovations caused the necessity to revise the role of the basic subjects in the market (the government, business structures, universities) and mechanisms of their interaction. The primary importance is now being shifted towards such subjects of innovations as resource centers, innovative businesses, technological platforms, the clusters capable of exerting efficient influence upon the innovations process, which, in its turn, improves the competitive ability of particular spheres of business and entire national economics. This process also influenced the construction industry. The purpose of this research is to analyze the manifestation of the phenomenon of the knowledge-based economics in the construction sphere. The tasks of this research: firstly, to highlight the evolution of the scientific discipline “knowledge-based economics”; secondly, to analyze the efficiency of the phenomenon on the example of the USA, the EC and Russia; thirdly, to analyze the innovative process in the construction sphere; fourthly, to highlight the role of various institutional structures (resource centers, innovative businesses, technological platforms, clusters) for innovative activity in the construction sphere.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Osamah Alsayegh

Abstract This paper examines the energy transition consequences on the oil and gas energy system chain as it propagates from net importing through the transit to the net exporting countries (or regions). The fundamental energy system security concerns of importing, transit, and exporting regions are analyzed under the low carbon energy transition dynamics. The analysis is evidence-based on diversification of energy sources, energy supply and demand evolution, and energy demand management development. The analysis results imply that the energy system is going through technological and logistical reallocation of primary energy. The manifestation of such reallocation includes an increase in electrification, the rise of energy carrier options, and clean technologies. Under healthy and normal global economic growth, the reallocation mentioned above would have a mild effect on curbing the oil and gas primary energy demands growth. A case study concerning electric vehicles, which is part of the energy transition aspect, is presented to assess its impact on the energy system, precisely on the fossil fuel demand. Results show that electric vehicles are indirectly fueled, mainly from fossil-fired power stations through electric grids. Moreover, oil byproducts use in the electric vehicle industry confirms the reallocation of the energy system components' roles. The paper's contribution to the literature is the portrayal of the energy system security state under the low carbon energy transition. The significance of this representation is to shed light on the concerns of the net exporting, transit, and net importing regions under such evolution. Subsequently, it facilitates the development of measures toward mitigating world tensions and conflicts, enhancing the global socio-economic wellbeing, and preventing corruption.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-97
Author(s):  
Melis Aras

The energy transition in Europe requires not only the implementation of technological innovations to reduce carbon emissions but also the decentralised extension of these innovations throughout the continent, as demonstrated by the ‘Clean Energy for All Europeans’ package. However, decentralised energy generation, and specifically electricity generation, as it gives rise to new players and interactions, also requires a review of the energy planning process. In this sense, governance becomes the key concept for understanding the implementation of the energy transition in a territory. This is particularly visible in a cross-border setting, especially considering cross-border cooperation in the development of renewable energy sources (RES) provides the necessary elements to determine the criteria of local regulation between the different levels of governance. In light of the current legal framework in France, this paper presents the institutional framework of the multi-level governance of the RES development planning process. It concludes that it is quite conceivable for the rationales of governance at the local level (decentralisation) and the large-scale operation of a large interconnected network (Europeanisation) to coexist.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 2601 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aino Rekola ◽  
Riikka Paloniemi

Societies aiming for a sustainable future need more effective and legitimate planning and decision making practices, in which various actors together find pathways towards a sustainable transition. In this paper, we approach sustainability and environmental justice as epistemological (and ontological) challenges for land-use planning, and empirically analyse how action research could support planners’ social learning and planning towards fair and sustainable development. We analysed qualitatively the evolution of the researcher–planner dialogue while co-designing and developing better methods, means and practices to improve environmental justice in regional scale planning in Kymenlaakso Region, South-East Finland. We found that researcher-planner dialogue developed during cooperation. While in the beginning, social learning related to approaching environmental justice as a fair distribution of power evolved incrementally, later, when dialogue became more focused, communicative and reflective as an outcome of mutual frames and trust, learning occurred in a more transformative way. Such transformative learning concerned recognising youth as a silent group in the planning process and the means to involve their perceptions in planning. In order to support sustainability transformation in the future, we conclude that it is essential to create opportunities for such incremental and transformative social learning through innovative modes of interaction in various contexts.


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