ゼロカーボン×デジタル：ポストコロナ時代の都市の脱炭素化 ZeroCarbon x Digital: Urban Decarbonization in the post-Covid-19 era

Clean energy technologies were long thought to be rural and suburban resources to be fed to urban centers. Several new trends are changing that situation. First the low cost of solar power, and materials science advances in thin-film and transparent solar cells have made on-site generation for better tailored to urban settings. Second, the rapid innovation in energy storage - both for buildings and vehicles -- mean that locally generated and remote power brought in by the transmission system -- can now be available '24/7'. Finally, a focus on the energy needs of minorites, disadvantaged communities, and low-income communities can all be far better served for power and transportation. Indeed, without a focus on low-income communities the social benefits of clean energy are being wasted.

The need to design resilient energy systems becomes ever more apparent as we continue to decarbonise across all sectors of society. Increasingly, modelling efforts focus on improving system resilience to stochastic variables for which data is increasingly abundant, such as weather and demand. However, we still fail to consider how supposedly “resilient” system designs will handle the realisation of uncertainty during operation, including exposure to unexpected shocks like grid failure. In this talk, I will present an example of embodying and quantifying resilience in district energy system design, and discuss the challenges that modellers still face in understanding and mitigating against uncertainty.

Japan has faced the rapid penetration of solar PV, and specific power service areas actually experience technical difficulty in integrating massive PV into the power grids. For maximization of renewable in energy system, energy planning needs to consider cost, decarbonization and resilience. This presentation discusses desirable power systems and institutions to maximize renewable energy, based on local- and national-scale energy modelling approach and analysis.

Energy is undergoing decarbonization, decentralization, and digitalization.Electricity markets are seeing an increase in distributed energy resources. The complexity that parallels this decentralization has led to a need of improved coordination through digital technologies, with blockchain being a key emerging technology. Blockchain is a digital distributed ledger which has also been referred to as the Internet of Value. It has been used in numerous Proof-of-Concept (PoC) applications such as peer-to-peer power-trading. However, such PoCs still face a series of economic, social, and institutional challenges. This talk will introduce opportunities and key challenges of blockchain in the power sector.

When we imagine a coming super city, it should provide many services with IoT devices. In this research, P2P energy exchange platform which is demonstrated in Higashifuji area is introduced as an example. Through blockchain based service platform, IoT devices, such as Electrical Vehicles, Stationary batteries, Renewable generators, business office agents, automatically co-operate and trade their energy based on each economic incentive. Such machine-to-machine service platform may be a good tool for future resource efficient city design.

The ways how human perceives cities are now both physical and digital.Impacts of mobile devices, the internet of things and pervasive computing to human senses in urban environment are to be further explored. The research integrates physical, performance and experiential modeling to explore how emerging technologies fundamentally change the way human perceives urban environment, and how Urban Systems Design (USD) shapes smart urban environment. It is structured by three components: 1) A design experiment to produce alternative urban form scenarios; 2) A performance modeling to derive properties of urban systems; 3) A design decision platform using digital twin to visualize design and performance outcomes.

Smart cities play a crucial role in tackling many issues concerning climate change,ranging from increasing energy efficiency and introducing renewable energy sources to maintaining resilience to extreme weather conditions such as floods and typhoons. In facilitating data-driven innovation for sustainable smart cities, effective collection, sharing and usage of data through collaboration among stakeholders would be critical for while addressing concerns about safety, security and privacy and the balance between open and proprietary data. Policy and institutional arrangements for data governance need to incorporate the ability to learn from real-world use and experience and to improve performance through adaptation.

As Australia leads the world in behind-the-meter PV, households are significantly reducing their electricity consumption while providing renewable energy to the rest of the electricity system. However, as integration problems begin to emerge, new strategies are being deployed to make the most of household PV generation to further decarbonisation. These include community-scale batteries providing virtual energy storage while alleviating grid constraints, systems that integrate with households within a microgrid to increase the use of renewable energy, to larger-scale community energy projects. Decarbonisation in Australia is continuing to develop as simultaneous transitions at the large- and small-scales.

Smart city has become one of the important keywords in urban planning in Japan.While smart city is an attractive vision for both urban planners and smart technology specialists, discussion on how urban visions and urban planning institutions should transform has not been conducted so much. The City Planning Institute of Japan has recently established a Special Committee on Smart City involving academics and practitioners in urban planning, urban development and smart technologies. This presentation presents some of the challenges recognized in the committee including 1)compactness and network, 2)value of real space, 3)relationship between planning and lawless, and 4)governance structure.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the disruptive impacts on economies and livelihoods when human activity transgresses planetary boundaries. The climate emergency poses an even greater threat to a sustainable future for similar reasons. This realisation has led city policymakers to contemplate how they can effectively manage the climate emergency and other COVIDf-like threats to sustainability. This presentation will examine synergies and trade-offs between climate and other sustainable development objectives in relevant city plans and policies in Japan and the United Kingdom.It will also discuss governance arrangements that can align interests to achieve the former and avoid the latter.

Investors who have signed up to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment criteria are estimated to manage above US$45 trillion in assets worldwide. From the huge funding potential, Asian cities would be encouraged to attract ESG investors by promoting some kinds of land marketization and asset securitization along with public policy programs. This talk suggests the importance of developing more systemic asset profiles and appropriate safeguard measures (e.g., evidence-based new land use and urban design codes, green building and smart mobility requirements, portfolio diversification strategies) against global risks,including pandemic threats.

We are now under numerous threats from climate change and covid-19. Our research is based on the idea that urban planning needs the data through simulation and emulation that make use of the power of the digital world. Our cyber-physical system works in smart cities while being realized, enabling performance measurement of city activities. From the perspective of an IT researcher, I would like to introduce the prospects for research on systems useful for adaptation strategies for climate change based on IoT and big data analysis, and human-centric cyber-physical systems.

Climate change is projected to increase the intensity and number of extreme events around the world. Cities, with more than half of the world’s population, have the potential to lead the decarbonization efforts. Co-design processes that help to ensure adoption of research and innovation efforts with the potential of creating systemic change will be at the heart of this change.