Scaling up Positive Energy Districts across Europe

Cities4PEDs, a two-year research project funded by JPI Urban Europe, organised a series of Energy Lunch Talks with the goal of learning and further discussing specific and relevant questions to investigate Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) aspects and implementation strategies. The project brought to the table testimonies of already existing innovative practices all around Europe and opened a conversation on possible shared challenges and in place strategies to further accelerate neighbourhood transformation and implementations toward PEDs development.

PEDs are urban neighbourhoods that generate more renewable energy than they consume. At a time when European cities are trying to get rid of fossil fuels, implementing PEDs sounds attractive. But how? Here’s what we can learn, from this first round of exchange, from the cities of Brussels, Delft, Lille, Lyon, Stockholm, Valencia & Vienna!

Energy communities and collective local capacity to accelerate PEDs’ deployment

Energy communities can empower citizens, foster social cohesion and help (re)build trust between citizens and with local governments. According to Etienne Vignali, from Lyon, sharing energy at district level via energy communities allows to maximise self-consumption and prevents from investing in costly storage technologies, while raising awareness of energy importance. If vulnerable households are included, as City Mine(d) is doing in Brussels, energy communities could also be a means of supporting a just transition, using the energy question as an answer to broader local needs and questions.

For energy communities to become widespread, having a sound understanding of the different target groups and simplifying the actions needed from their side is crucial. In addition, collective actions, such as awareness campaigns at district level, joint purchasing and collective renovation, also allow to develop more energy communities, hence igniting local empowerment and autonomy. In any case, local governments’ support is key to set the framework for local stakeholders to collaborate and to win citizens’ trust. The city of Valencia placed energy communities at the centre of their energy strategy, aiming at 100 energy communities by 2030.

The need for urban planning and a transformation of the construction sector

Although they often require an important mapping work of existing buildings and resources, urban planning instruments such as renewable energy production or heating systems regulation can boost PEDs’ development. In fact, defining different zones in urban plans allows proposing different solutions or setting requirements adapted to the specificities of each district. Nonetheless, pushing for diverse obligations, such as connecting to district heating systems or switching to renewable-based heating appliances, needs to be accompanied by strong communication towards urban developers and citizens to guide them in this pivotal shift. In this vein, the city of Vienna developed a service platform to guide citizens, listing (among other things) trusted companies to potentially collaborate with.

Furthermore, to achieve PEDs, a transformation of the construction sector is needed. The Municipality of Lille understood this and thus initiated a process of co-creation with local developers and designers, to constitute together the collective basis for the Low Carbon Pact. Another issue is that all too often, building developers miss the targets they were required to achieve: the results of buildings’ energy consumption can be assessed at the earliest one or two years after the new owners live in the building, and the developers aren’t then legally liable anymore. To overcome this, Stockholm developed an ambitious and compulsory capacity programme for developers, to push them towards higher achievements. All developers to whom land has been sold in the Royal SeaPort District are required to share their approaches and monitor their results. The city also publishes the results of the building performances to incentivise developers: monitoring the results and analysing the reasons for failures are key for improving results!

The city of Delft, on the other hand, developed a series of measures ranging from a continuous communication campaign to investing in its own real estate, subsidising businesses and setting clear deliverables for social housing companies. It is worth noting that while for newly built districts, it is possible to recognise many strategies to transfer high ambition to developers, in existing districts, experimentations still need to be implemented to better understand which levers need to be pushed in order to accelerate and constitute different types of supportive systems for the renovation of our built environment.  

Dedicated and skilled human resources as a precondition

Decarbonising buildings, setting up strategies for district transformation, and multiplying PEDs in cities is a marathon, that will only be achieved through a multi-pronged strategy covering citizen engagement, collective renovation, urban planning instruments, activation of building developers and specific organisation of local governments. But mostly, it requires skilled and numerous human resources in city administrations in the long term to drive strategies, trigger projects, motivate stakeholders and support citizens.

As Etienne Vignali from Lyon Confluence puts it, “the most important is not the legal status and the governance model chosen, but the dedicated people who are working to decarbonise our districts”.

Missed our Energy Lunch Talks Series? Find out more about the different sessions and watch the webinars’ recordings here.