Energy Resilience, Vulnerability and Risk in Urban Spaces

• Main Authors: Guglielmina Mutani, Valeria Todeschi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SDEWES Centre 2018-12-01
• Series: Journal of Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems
• Subjects: Energy models; Energy security; Energy sustainability; District heating; Urban scale; Geographic information system.
• Online Access: http://www.sdewes.org/jsdewes/pid6.0203

Nowadays, resilience is a necessary component for a sustainable development of cities. Achieving increased resilience requires improved risk assessment and modeling, better planning and design, increased communication and collaboration. The aim of this study is to propose a flexible methodology in order to analyse the energy sustainability and the risks of the metropolitan cities, in this case the method has been applied to the City of Turin. The main objectives are to evaluate the characteristics of the existing energy systems, their impact on sustainability and to understand how to satisfy the high-energy demand in a critical urban environment with few available renewable energy sources. This work describes a methodology to identifying energy risks, vulnerabilities and resilience for residential and tertiary buildings in Turin. Three indicators to evaluate the energy resilience and security assessment were used. In particular, the assessment of impact of individual indicators was conducted by using the aggregation and weighting method. To improve energy resilience, two future scenarios were assumed: the expansion of the existing district heating and the exploitation of roof-integrated solar-thermal collectors. The first results on historical trend show that the annual thermal energy consumption depends on climate data but also on per capita earning, with an annual decrease of 3% after 2007. A similar trend can be observed in natural gas consumption, in fact every year, natural gas decreases by 3%, while the district heating network increases by 8%. The results of future scenarios show an improvement of energy resilience, with a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions up to 12% with district heating expansion and 39% with also the use of solar collectors.