Many cities across the world have the ambition of becoming carbon neutral, but exact figures of progress toward that goal are limited. Regarding Europe’s not overly ambitious 2020 carbon emission targets, many countries still have a long way to go (see Fig. 1), with cities as the prime objects for improvement. It is fair to say that the energy transition is lagging behind, for which several reasons can be given. One assumption, based on experience with projects with various European cities, is that cities—their administrations and other stakeholders—generally have insufficient understanding of how to gain and maintain control over the complex process of the energy transition with its multiple actors and diverse objectives and responsibilities. Another suggested reason is the lack of appropriate approaches, strategies, and methods to guide the energy transition in formulating clear targets and intermediate steps of mainly technical and spatial interventions. These, however are currently under development, and are being tested in cities across the continent—such as in Gothenburg, London, Rotterdam, Cologne, and Genova within the EU project Celsius (www.celsiuscity.eu), and in Amsterdam and Grenoble, for the EU project City-zen (www.cityzen-smartcity.eu)—with promising results so far. The main research question underlying this chapter is: How can cities be supported in their energy transition toward carbon neutrality? We will describe the development of approaches, strategies, and methods for the urban energy transition, their background and theoretical basis, and present urban case studies where they were applied. Finally, an outlook will be given for methodological developments in the near future.@en

Although more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, this trend is expected to continue and there is an increasing awareness of the need to move to a fully sustainable urban energy system, this transition process is still significantly lagging behind in many places. The yield of many renewable energy sources is directly related to the surface available for deployment. Because of this and the high density of cities, urban planners face the difficult challenge of incorporating energy based planning in their practices. The TU Delft method of Energy Potential Mapping provides the means to spatially quantify energy demand and renewable supply in the built environment in a unified way. This paper presents three current research projects that apply the EPM method in European cities: CELSIUS (smart District Heating and Cooling), City-zen (urban transition strategies) and PLANHEAT (urban DHC planning toolset).@en

Cities play a key role in driving the transition to sustainable energy. Urban areas represent between 60% and 80% of global energy consumption and are a significant source of CO2 emissions, making energy management at the urban scale an important area of research. Urban energy systems have a strong influence on the environment, economy, social dimensions and urban spatial planning. Energy consumption affects the urban microclimate, urban comfort, human health, and conversely, urban physical, economic and social characteristics affect the energy urban profile. In order to improve the quality of energy strategies, policies, and plans, local authorities need decision support tools, like energy potential mapping, which have risen significance in the last decades. Energy data are crucial for those tools. They can increase the quality and effectiveness of energy planning but also support the integration between energy and spatial planning. Energy data can also stimulate citizen engagement as well as encourage sustainable behaviours and CO2 emission reduction. This paper aims to increase the practice of data-aware planning, through the study of problems in energy data acquisition and processing observed in European projects focused on developing energy mapping tools. The problems observed attend to two main areas: technical and socio-economic issues. Those were derived from a comparison of energy mapping tools, and the work conducted for the PLANHEAT development. The scope of the research is to understand the main recurring issues in energy data acquisition and processing, in order to overcome the barriers in data availability. Increasing awareness of the relevance of energy data can foster the use of energy mapping tools, increasing the quality of energy policies and planning.@en

This document is one of a four-part guide on how to accelerate the heat transition in cities. In this module the technical and physical aspects of the transition from fossil to renewable heating are emphasised. In the first section the reader is informed about the reasons why we need to transition our heating systems in the built environment to renewable sources. The second section provides the reader with an overview of technology choices and strategies, and is aimed at helping you make technical decisions.@en

This report presents Deliverables 2.1 and 2.2 of the Horizon 2020 SCCALE 203050 project (Sustainable Collective Citizen Action for a Local Europe). The aim of this project is to scale the growth of energy communities - or “Renewable Energy Communities'' according to the EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) - across Europe in the areas of energy efficiency, renewable energy production, district heating in households and non-residential buildings. This report is the first deliverable of Work package 2 (Research and Academic Validation) which seeks to gain a better understanding of how collective citizen actions in sustainable energy develop, grow, mature - in other words, how they come of age. This will be done by analysing, monitoring and evaluating experiences of collective citizen action and community engagement in the domains of sustainable energy (i.e. renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy conservation). This report first presents the results of a literature review (i.e. Deliverable 2.1) – using both academic and grey literature - on energy communities and collective citizen actions contributing to sustainable energy transitions. However, the report goes beyond a literature study. Instead, it was developed as a collaborative effort between the research team at Delft University of Technology and community energy experts and practitioners using multiple interactive and feedback meetings. The central aim of this report is to generate insights into the actions and activities energy communities and citizen collectives undertake to develop and mature their organisations with the objective to scale, achieve transformative change, and make both a social and environmental impact. The report maps state of the art insights into collective citizen actions at the neighbourhood level, targeting energy efficiency and renewable energy technology measures alike. Moreover, it addresses relevant theory and good practice on actions and activities that energy communities can pursue, partly based on theory and partly based on case studies. In addition, the report also takes into account issues like energy poverty, energy democracy, energy justice, social inclusiveness, citizen engagement, multi-stakeholder management in neighbourhoods, the use of digital tools, and data protection (to cope with increasing cybersecurity issues). In addition, the report presents the development and design of a monitoring tool (Deliverable 2.2). The Development Progress Tool uses knowledge from the literature study. This is firstly used to elaborate the energy community maturity scale and framework as developed under the Horizon 2020 COMPILE project (Seebauer et al., 2022). The elaborated maturity index forms the conceptual basis and framework to develop a monitoring tool. The latter will be implemented, tested and validated among the five demonstration pilots of SCCALE 203050 in 2022-2023. @en

Although more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities, this trend is expected to continue and there is an increasing awareness of the need to move to a fully sustainable urban energy system, this transition process is still significantly lagging behind in many places. The yield of many renewable energy sources is directly related to the surface available for deployment. Because of this and the high density of cities, urban planners face the difficult challenge of incorporating energy based planning in their practices. The TU Delft method of Energy Potential Mapping provides the means to spatially quantify energy demand and renewable supply in the built environment in a unified way. This paper presents three current research projects that apply the EPM method in European cities: CELSIUS (smart District Heating and Cooling), City-zen (urban transition strategies) and PLANHEAT (urban DHC planning toolset).@en

Purpose: City-zen is an EU-funded interdisciplinary project that aims to develop and demonstrate energy-efficient cities and to build methods and tools for cities, industries and citizens to achieve ambitious sustainability targets. As part of the project, an Urban Energy Transition Methodology is developed, elaborated and used to create Roadmaps, which indicate the interventions needed to get from the current situation to the desired sustainable future state of a city. For one of the partner cities, Amsterdam, such a Roadmap was developed. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach: This paper discusses the approach and methodology behind the City-zen Urban Energy Transition Methodology, with its six steps from the initial energy analysis to the roadmap towards a desired future state. The paper will illustrate this by results from the Amsterdam Roadmap study, in numbers and figures. Findings: The Roadmap study of Amsterdam revealed that the city can become energy neutral in its heat demand, but not in the production of sufficient electricity from renewables. Research limitations/implications: Although as yet only applied to the City of Amsterdam, the methodology behind the roadmap can be applied by cities across the world. Practical implications: An enormous effort is required in order to transform, renovate and adapt parts of the city. It was calculated, for instance, how many energy renovation projects, district heating pipes and photovoltaic panels will be annually needed in order to timely become carbon neutral, energy neutral and “fossil free”. Social implications: The technical-spatial content of the Roadmap was presented to stakeholders of the Dutch capital city, such as politicians, energy companies, commercial enterprises, and not least citizens themselves. Although informed by scientific work, the Roadmap appealed too many, demonstrated by the extensive media coverage. Originality/value: The City-zen Methodology builds upon earlier urban energy approaches such as REAP (Tillie et al., 2009), LES (Dobbelsteen et al., 2011) and Energy Potential Mapping (Broersma et al., 2013), but creates a stepped approach that has not been presented and applied to a city as a whole yet. As far as the authors know, so far, an energy transition roadmap has never been developed for an entire city.@en

Purpose: City-zen is an EU-funded interdisciplinary project that aims to develop and demonstrate energy-efficient cities and to build methods and tools for cities, industries and citizens to achieve ambitious sustainability targets. As part of the project, an Urban Energy Transition Methodology is developed, elaborated and used to create Roadmaps, which indicate the interventions needed to get from the current situation to the desired sustainable future state of a city. For one of the partner cities, Amsterdam, such a Roadmap was developed. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach: This paper discusses the approach and methodology behind the City-zen Urban Energy Transition Methodology, with its six steps from the initial energy analysis to the roadmap towards a desired future state. The paper will illustrate this by results from the Amsterdam Roadmap study, in numbers and figures. Findings: The Roadmap study of Amsterdam revealed that the city can become energy neutral in its heat demand, but not in the production of sufficient electricity from renewables. Research limitations/implications: Although as yet only applied to the City of Amsterdam, the methodology behind the roadmap can be applied by cities across the world. Practical implications: An enormous effort is required in order to transform, renovate and adapt parts of the city. It was calculated, for instance, how many energy renovation projects, district heating pipes and photovoltaic panels will be annually needed in order to timely become carbon neutral, energy neutral and “fossil free”. Social implications: The technical-spatial content of the Roadmap was presented to stakeholders of the Dutch capital city, such as politicians, energy companies, commercial enterprises, and not least citizens themselves. Although informed by scientific work, the Roadmap appealed too many, demonstrated by the extensive media coverage. Originality/value: The City-zen Methodology builds upon earlier urban energy approaches such as REAP (Tillie et al., 2009), LES (Dobbelsteen et al., 2011) and Energy Potential Mapping (Broersma et al., 2013), but creates a stepped approach that has not been presented and applied to a city as a whole yet. As far as the authors know, so far, an energy transition roadmap has never been developed for an entire city.@en

Pioneer cities have demonstrated a willingness and capability to decarbonise local heat systems, but support is needed to scale up action. Heat decarbonisation is not simply a technical challenge, but also a political and social one; stakeholders must inform decisions about appropriate technological and policy solutions and will, in turn, be affected by them. Taking three dimensions of stakeholders, technology, and policy, a structured approach which centres stakeholders is presented to help local government to collaboratively find appropriate technology and policy solutions, both at the strategic scale across the municipality and in localised pilot projects, and explores how to initialise and support heat decarbonisation in more cities. @en

Co-creation is often presented as a solution to challenges of achieving energy transitions. However, there is currently little known about how coordinating stakeholders, such as city administrations, interpret co-creation and the extent to which this influences co-creation processes. We draw on a recent project, which embedded co-creation in public decision-making about local-level, sustainable heating transitions. We specifically address the question of how co-creation has been interpreted and implemented by administrations in two major Belgian cities, Bruges and Mechelen, between 2019 and 2023. Data collection included expert interviews, participatory observation, workshops, focus groups, and reviews of action plans and policy documents. We found that a normative understanding of co-creation evolved amongst the project coordinators, who inherently valued the inclusion of citizens in sustainable heat transitions, although actual co-creation only took place at the end of the project (2022–2023). However, we observed structural impediments and contexts that impinge on co-creation: a perceived conflict between community engagement and existing policy agendas, departmental interests; the instrumental framing of projects and the role of co-creation; and the impact of wider political pressures and events (in this case the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions). Conclusions are drawn regarding the longer-term benefits of co-creation for coordinating stakeholders. We also stress the need for research to more fully attend to the structural relations that enable and constrain these actors to practice and innovate with co-creation.@en

SHIFFT is an Interreg 2 Seas project, running from 2019-2022, promoting cross-border cooperation between 4 European countries: The Netherlands, France, Belgium and The United Kingdom. It has been approved under the priority ‘Low Carbon Technologies’.@en

This document represents deliverable 2.6 of the PLANHEAT project, a result of task 2.2.2 on unconventional sources, part of Work Package 2 on the Mapping Module. The purpose of this task is to develop simple and detailed models for mapping local energy sources and to allocate and map sources and information (heating and cooling factor).@en

Following the Paris Climate Agreements, all European cities must undergo a transition towards asustainable, net zero-carbon energy system. This is an unprecedented challenge that will require a lot of knowledge and methodological support.For the City-zen project, under the coordination and execution of TU Delft, chair of Climate Design & Sustainability, as task within City-zen (WP4, T2), the City-zen Urban Energy Transition Methodology (in short: City-zen Methodology) was developed and tested on various Roadshows (WP9, T3.2) and finally used for the Amsterdam Roadmap (WP4, T2 too). The Amsterdam energy transition roadmap was published in 2018.The essence of the City-zen Urban Energy Transition Methodology is as follows: based on extensive research into energy characteristics of the city, planned near-future developments, stakeholder analyses and future scenarios, a sustainable city vision can be elaborated, after which a roadmap with different energy transition paths can be defined.Such a roadmap was already made for the city of Amsterdam; this report uses maps and images of that study to exemplify steps taken in the City-zen Methodology.@en