Adriano Bisello

Co-benefits of Smart and Sustainable Energy District Projects: An Overview of Economic Assessment Methodologies

The concept of “co-benefit” is commonly adopted to define any additional positive impact of a policy, program, or project, arising alongside the desired primary goal. Co-benefits relate to human health and well-being, as well as environmental, economic, and social aspects. The concept, investigated beginning in the 1990s, is recognized today, as supported worldwide by several notable organizations, to provide a better grasp of the economic value of foreseen or applied measures. Nevertheless, given the complexity of achieving complete pictures and understanding many interrelations or cascade effects, co-benefits are often only analyzed locally or measured qualitatively. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the methodologies for economic assessment that are applicable to the monetization of co-benefits related to Smart and Sustainable Energy District Projects. Starting from a previously defined framework of expected co-benefits, we analyzed the various techniques, identifying the most appropriate with respect to target stakeholders and expected outcomes. As a result, we obtained a clear and comprehensive assessment model, tailored to a specific project type, and operationally applicable. This model would sustain the funding, public acceptance, and political commitment of Smart and Sustainable Energy District Projects, enabling the various stakeholders to better understand the entire economic value of a project, in addition to energy saving and greenhouse gasses reduction.

Smart and Sustainable Planning for Cities and Regions

For several years, many cities around the world are moving through a number of initiatives to implement the so-called “city dashboards”, as an opportunity for a new quality of urban life in terms of knowing and governing cities. The main contribution of this paper is to examine how city dashboards are performing on various metrics and comparing them in order to understand what they do. Starting from this perspective, to the best of our knowledge and by examining dashboard examples, there are many differences in the products that go by the name “city dashboards”. Moreover there are several methodological and technical issues that are not dealt with and yet solved in terms of data, indicators and benchmarking. The design of a city dashboard needs a clear vision of the direction that public administrations intend to undertake, alongside an ability to build scenarios and analyze the results of experiments in the context of the changing urban variables. Given the gap in academic literature concerning this subject, we developed a goal-oriented framework for examining the characteristics of various city dashboards and developing a taxonomy. Our framework enables a more systematic process for developing an effective city dashboard and provides useful insights to decision makers. The results suggest that some features emerge and our findings highlight specific clusters.

EUSALP, a Model Region for Smart Energy Transition: Setting the Baseline

Nowadays energy transition is a recurring topic, which describes the process of an energy system moving from fossil-based sources towards renewables. The transition can unfold at different levels, from the single initiative of a local community to a complex cross-border agreement. The latter type is well represented by EUSALP, the European macro-regional strategy for the Alpine region. One of its aims is to transform its territory into a model region for energy efficiency and renewable energy. To support a well-informed decision making process, this study provides the first insight about the status quo of energy balances in EUSALP, at local as well as aggregated level. Moreover, it offers an overview on the various energy targets defined by the territorial units that constitute the EUSALP region. Data has been retrieved via a bottom-up quality-oriented process consisting of (i) a survey targeted at responsible person in local energy departments; and (ii) data control and harmonization. We found that the EUSALP region is actually a model region only in clean power production, whereas starting point as well as energy targets of territories are highly heterogeneous. We also identified the need of more harmonized data collection methodologies. We conclude that this bottom-up process can support and legitimate policy makers in cross-border cooperation activities under a smart macro-regional energy strategy, which pursues an increment in energy savings, renewable energy production and a broad engagement of relevant stakeholders.

Multiple-Benefits from Buildings’ Refurbishment: Evidence from Smart City Projects in Europe

Given the necessity of strengthening the transition towards a smarter, more sustainable low-carbon future, Smart Cities are considered a powerful tool. However, Smart City projects involving the refurbishment of existing buildings carry key barriers to implementation. The most prominent ones are: (i) a wide time discrepancy between appreciable environmental and economic benefits and immediate costs of action and (ii) economic benefits that might not accrue to who bears the cost of the intervention. This research provides a clue to solving this impasse based on the concept of multiple-benefits evaluation stemming from a shift in perspective from mitigation costs to development opportunities. We considered the costs of interventions on the European building stock under the Smart City projects to assess the multiple-benefits delivered to society. Starting from the monetary aspects of single projects, we identified multipliers to assess three different types of multiple-benefits: (i) Energy savings; (ii) Health and well-being; and iii.) Employment. Our findings indicate that in a time span of 14 years (2005–2018), an amount of about 260 million Euros invested in such projects lead to: (i) an accumulated saving potential of approximately 40 kilotons of oil equivalent, corresponding to 465 GWh; (ii) a reduction in air pollution corresponding to a value of 3 million Euros in avoided costs; and (iii) the creation of around 1,000 jobs with an average duration of 5 years. Considering that most of such investments occurred during the latest economic recession, the impact of the aforementioned multi-benefits appears to be not negligible.

Energy Communities in a Distributed-Energy Scenario: Four Different Kinds of Community Arrangements

Distributed-energy generation enables a closer link to be established between energy production and energy consumption, but it does not, in itself, necessarily entail any (new) particular role or organization for groups of people. Nevertheless, because of the distributed-energy spread, the phenomenon of so-called energy communities is growing: all over the world, different kinds of groups organized to produce and consume energy are flourishing. In this regard, the term “energy community” is used in a generic sense to refer to heterogeneous phenomena. This work contributes to the study of energy communities by identifying key features that enhance understanding of what energy communities are. Since the literature seems to offer only partial points of view, this chapter intends to contribute to building a new taxonomy of energy communities with which to understand the nature and possible effects of the phenomenon. A first distinction can be drawn between place-based communities and non-place-based ones: in the first case, there is coherence between the community and a specific territory; this does not occur in the second case. Another difference is apparent between communities which form (and operate) only for energy purposes and those which instead add other purposes; in this regard, we can further distinguish between “energy-only communities” and “multi-issue communities”. These two pairs of possibilities give rise to a four-cell matrix: that is, to four main cases of energy communities.

Assessing Preferences for Attributes of City Information Points: Results from a Choice Experiment

A choice experiment has been carried out to assess the preferred attributes of information points (called totems) to be installed in the city of Bolzano. Totems allow the acquisition, exchange and query of data in real time, as well as provide other services such as electricity or water supply. These infrastructures could be useful for both inhabitants and tourists in need of parking spaces, information about events or charging stations for vehicles. To design them in a cost-effective way, it is important to understand potential users’ preferences. For this reason, field surveys using stated preferences are important sources of information to tailor these totem effectively. In order to facilitate the interpretation of results for policy making, estimations are carried out in willingness-to-pay space and by means of a random parameters logit model. Results indicate that the preferred attributes are the presence of Wi-Fi “hot spots”, charging stations for electric cars and bikes and real-time information about available car parks.

World Café Method to Engage Smart Energy-District Project Partners in Assessing Urban Co-benefits

Urban energy-district projects introduce outstanding technological innovation in buildings and energy systems increasing sustainability in city neighborhoods. Such projects generate additional co-benefits for the city beyond changes in physical elements and development of social and institutional relationships (e.g. local employment, environmental quality, public health, property values, innovation attitude, etc.). Since exceeding main declared goals or not always clearly foreseen in the early project phase, these co-benefits are often not properly understood and considered. However, only their explicit recognition will make possible their inclusion in the assessment of the whole project’s performance. From these considerations, this study faces the issue of engaging project partners in assessing co-benefits in order to consider a broad spectrum of relevant, positive effects in the evaluation process. Group knowledge and group thinking of this complex topic are investigated through the world cafe method, providing an atmosphere of trust and open discussions among participants. This empirical work lays the foundations to go beyond the mere economic measure as the sole criterion for assessing project effects, also including changes in end-user behavior and intangible assets.