On the 27th of October, ‘Smart Cities and Communities Positive Energy Districts Workshop’ was held, as part of the Sustainable Places 2020 digital event. The workshop aimed at presenting and discussing different tools and approaches of how to improve the collaboration between the different people, businesses and organisations in a smart city community when deploying innovative energy concepts like Positive Energy Districts. +CityxChange (H2020) together with MAKING-CITY (H2020), POCITYF (H2020), ENERGE (Interreg NWE), ATELIER (H2020), mySMARTLife (H2020), showcased their project solutions in a two hours workshop.
The workshop looked at different themes from different SCC1 projects around the concepts of PEBs and other novel urban energy approaches. Presentations were around collaboration, schools, secondary benefits and payback times PED-readiness, regulatory and acceptance barriers, innovation, energy systems, and replication.
Our project manager, Dr Dirk Ahlers from NTNU, presented the topic on ‘Growth and replication of PED sites in urban environments’, using insights from +CityxChange. The project is developing and deploying Positive Energy Blocks and Districts (PEB/PED) and scaling these out as part of the European Clean Energy Transition in cities. As the main objective, designing PEDs which are intrinsically scalable up and well embedded in the spatial, economic, technical, environmental and social context (starting from the idea of plus local generation), is of prime importance. The presentation included the work that is being done in some of the Demonstration Areas of our project – Powerhouse Brattøra, Trondheim; Gardens International, Limerick; Calle Txabarri, Sestao; Lysgården – Sluppen, Trondheim – and how starting from these hubs we can scale it up to achieve PEDs. Further on, +CityxChange replication/upscaling plan, as well as our ambition to build replicable solutions that work in all 7 cities and beyond, were discussed.
The session gave a chance to interact with the other present projects and understand their viewpoints and similarities between the projects.
