Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Peter Droege is an expert on the role of renewable energy within the fields of urban design, development and urban infrastructure. He has directed and developed Solar City, a research development effort conducted under the auspices of the International Energy Agency. Droege has performed academic roles at major universities in the United States and Japan, and is presently holding professorial positions at the Universities of Newcastle, Australia and Beijing, China. He is a Chair of the World Council for Renewable Energy, for Asia Pacific, and directs Epolis, a Sydney-based consultancy active in sustainable urban change worldwide.

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Frequently the site of crisis or turmoil, individual cities can be fragile environments. For the first time in history, however, the future of the entire urban system is being thrown into doubt. Catastrophic climate changes threaten the life support of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of urban dwellers around the world. Supplies of fossil fuels, especially oil and natural gas, are declining worldwide. Modern cities not only depend on petroleum products for their power, but also for their goods and services – including the making and packaging of virtually all food. How might this precarious global condition be turned around? How can the energy infrastructure of cities, towns and rural settlements be restructured, to confront the environmental challenges of our time? Could a new, positive global vision emerge out of the impending, massive shift from unsustainable fuels to a renewable energy base?

Opening with a definition of renewable power, the book concisely sets out the fundamental logic and philosophical framework of the urban energy revolution. It then progresses to look at how cities best attempt adaptation to accelerating, anthropogenic climate change: by mitigating it and fighting its root causes. Two central chapters map the spatial implications of the urban renewable energy transformation and the new technologies that might be involved in successfully creating the renewable city. The guide not only compares different approaches to creating renewable cities, but also examines various sustainable building assessment and design tools. The volume concludes with an easy to use best-practice template for local governments and planners, applying lessons from advanced cities around the world

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The Renewable City

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

1.1 ENERGY AND URBAN SUSTAINABILITY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly. Balzac (in Manning 2004)

Our time has been declared the age of the city. Urban centres are heralded as the engines of the global economy. A large library of books and articles hails cities as drivers of national prosperity and home of the leaders in creativity and innovation (Castells 2000; Florida 2002; Friedmann and Wulff 1976; Hall 1977; Hall 1998; Jacobs 1985; Mazza 1988; Sassen 1991, 1994/2000). The city-giddy genre has fuelled a worldwide urban marketing frenzy, while sparing not a thought for the most basic and most tenuous of all present growth drivers: cheap and abundant fossil fuel. Among the best researched and most thoughtful of these texts is Saskia Sassen's Cities in a World Economy (Sassen 1994/2000) which attempts to describe the global economic system without reference to its underlying fossil energy economy: it ignores the very engine that propels the much-admired global financial industry. Examined critically, the financial sector is but the froth on the churning, petroleum-rich global resource consumption and value-adding streams. And while Peter Hall's definitive tome on Western Cities in Civilisation (Hall 1998) did describe the electrification of Berlin as contributing to its cultural ascent, it misses altogether the larger nexus of the 20th-century fossil fuel revolution and the rise of contemporary urbanity and urbanism. There are, however, several soberer and specialised studies emerging, on cities, energy and greenhouse gas emissions, that provide an insight into broader urban policy and institutional change, such as a study examining urban energy use and greenhouse gas emissions in Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing and Shanghai, produced at the Japan-based Institute for Global Environment Strategies (IGES) (Dhakal 2004).

But in general, dreams about attaining city salvation in the nirvana of comparative advantage - the obssession of many city governments with achieving economic superiority - have distracted urban observers from facing the sobering reality that the urban world thrives on a rich Petri dish of only temporarily plentiful petroleum nutrients. Conceptually, both the modern ideal and its post-modern critique drift blindly on the vast, warm ocean of wasteful abundance that has been engendered by the empowering regime of coal, petroleum, natural gas and uranium combustion during the 20th century. The amplifying force of these new power facilitators helped to accelerate dramatically the exploitation of natural resources, feeding the present dogma of massive and conspicuous consumption as the global religion of progress (Sloterdijk 2005). The energy blindness of current urban literature is understandable, given that fossil fuels have had an overwhelming role in defining and determining virtually all aspects of contemporary social, technological and cultural reality. Ironically the energy question has been largely ignored within infrastructure engineering or urban economics, too.

Understandable it may be, but not forgivable given the enormously erroneous conclusions that can be drawn from a partial understanding of the world. A favoured soundbite featured in urban policy conferences holds that close to half the earth's population 'lives in cities' or, more accurately, in areas defined as urban or urbanised in one form or another. This reinforces the truism that virtually all of the present global population increase is registered in urban areas. Yet no migrational phenomenon - the impetus of a rural exodus or the massive pull by the electrified metropolises of the developing world - supports the suggestion that higher cultural destinies or basic evolutionary principles are being fulfilled in the urbanisation phenomenon. No new or eternal age of cities is upon us as a preordained crowning of human civilisation. There is also considerable lack of clarity, to say the least, about the root causes of urbanisation: some argue that it is triggered by changes in global and regional economies; others point to structural adjustment policies eroding the viability of rural productivity and places; and quite a few have taken the compelling statistics as cultural epiphany: they sincerely believe that the world's population is waking up to the fact that universal human progress and destiny lie in cities. Some of these and other factors are certainly at work but these alone could not exert a powerful force for urbanisation without the 20th-century's fossil energy regime having performed as the primary architect and driver of urban evolution.

Modern cities thrive on petroleum

There would be no modern form of globalisation without global, fossil-fuel charged supply chains, trade routes or military hardware. It can be argued - however moot and meaningless such fascinating speculation might be - that had the Industrial Revolution led to a path of renewable technological innovation, there would be no modern cities, no internet, no global shipping industry, no air traffic, no modern weaponry - certainly not in the form that these are known and understood today. Renewable energy optimists would argue that today civilisation would be far more advanced, could expect superior survival prospects, substantially less pollution and exist on a far smaller ecological footprint within a general realm of ecological equilibrium. Pessimistic fossil apologists would insist that humanity would either be stuck in renewably charged quasi-tribal, proto-democratic territorial skirmishes, or have arrived at a solar doomsday machine by now, given its most powerful nations' well-established appetite for and meticulously honed skills in conquest and destruction. Whatever the type of retrospective futurism in which one wishes to indulge, it is difficult to overstate the significance of black gold in defining virtually everything that cities are today: spatially, economically and culturally.

It is also important to remember that the fossil fuel regime creates an enormous drag on global and local prosperity. Trillions of dollars in damages are incurred annually - including social and environmental costs - in warfare, human exploitation, oil spills, soil and groundwater pollution, freshwater depletion, and wide-spread disease and deaths due to cancer and respiratory ailments triggered by toxic gases and airborne particles. The rising insurance and reinsurance claims arising from climate-change prompted weather events alone are staggering. Storm damage cover in the United States grew sixty-fold between the 1950s and 1990s, to US$ 6 billion annually (Mills 2005). World Bank studies show that China's fossil air pollution is responsible for US$ 50 billion in health costs every year: in the European Union these costs are estimated as US$ 70 billion (Geller 2002). This gargantuan cost of doing business is disregarded in planning the energy systems of new urban areas, industries or infrastructure investments. The promising City of Tomorrow is heavily discounted: its intrinsic value substantially diminished by the enormous price to be paid.

In contrast, the prospect of a pervasive global renewable-energy matrix offers the promise of far greater global prosperity, in two ways. First, the enormous environmental, social and economic costs of the fossil and nuclear energy regimes would be avoided. And second, a massive boost would be provided to technological innovation, employment generation and wealth creation opportunities across the socio-economic spectrum. Large parts of the economy would be liberated from the shackles of an antiquated set of industries, freeing innovation potential from the heavy restrictions of the fossil/nuclear power generation and distribution oligopolies. Contemporary cities are caught in the conventional fuel trap, and are therefore best labelled fossil cities, while both idea and reality of the Renewable City are firmly focused on shedding the fossil and nuclear shackles, as quickly as possible.

The Fossil City has reached its apex. The simultaneous concentration and expansion of cities since the mid-20th century were driven by massive investment in centralised infrastructure, and especially in power systems, within a heavily subsidised and hence seemingly cheap fossil-fuel economy, now at its peak. As a result, the cities in the 30 members states of the elite Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) consume between 60 and 80 per cent of their respective national energy production, including transport within and among urban areas (OECD 1995). This highlights modern cities' powerful role in worldwide, manmade greenhouse gas emissions: in 1998 fossil fuels, the main source of anthropogenic C[O.sub.2]-equivalent emissions, made up a staggering 85.8 per cent of total global commercial energy consumption: 40 per cent from oil; 23.3 per cent from coal and 22.5 per cent from natural gas. Nuclear power plants supplied 2.3-6.5 per cent; and 7 per cent were derived from hydroelectric facilities. A mere 0.7-4.9 per cent was captured from biomass, geothermal, solar and wind sources combined (USGS 2005, other sources). And since the fossil peak has not quite been reached yet, the zombie-like abuse of fossil fuels continues to mount at a rapid rate - along with that of nuclear power - their consumption presently still growing faster than that of all renewable energy systems combined. Between 1990 and 2002 global fossil energy use - of coal, gas and oil - expanded by 44 per cent, while the total renewable-energy share has increased by only 33 per cent (Scheer 2005).

Since the early 1980s, about three-quarters of human-generated or anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions were attributable to fossil fuel use (EIA 2006). In the wealthier countries fossil fuels are the dominant source by far, and in the developing world land clearing and other forms of deforestation are more significant, but with fossil fuel use on the rise here also (Nakicenovij and Svart 2001). And the carbon-friendly International Energy Agency projected until recently a further 60 per cent increase in world energy demand by 2030, with a steady 85 per cent of this hike attributed to rising oil, gas and coal demand (IEA 2004).

But as fossil fuel use and emissions rise, awareness increases enormously, too - as it has over the past 30 years. As global demand surges to another record high without any prospect of abatement in sight, the nerves of many urban leaders are getting frayed. Significant security, supply and sustainability shortcomings have surfaced. A race to press renewable sources into service has commenced, although the collective public policy consciousness has for the most part still to join it. The looming threat of global environmental collapse, precipitated by greenhouse-emission induced climate change and paired with the inevitable plateauing of global fossil fuel production, have unmasked as pretty pipe dreams the infinite-growth ideologies that swept the late 19th and 20th centuries. Yet despite having been intellectually discredited, these nostalgic doctrines still linger on, out of sheer inertia and popular need for collective comfort blankets. As a consequence, global warming trends continue, unrestrained even by the woefully inadequate Kyoto-based carbon management efforts.

Kyoto: neither far enough nor fast enough

The combined reduction target for C[O.sub.2] emissions for all Kyoto-subscribing nations was set at a modest 5 per cent below their collective 1990 levels, to be met between the years 2008 and 2012. Yet emissions have increased substantially since this target has been agreed to, while the reductions needed to halt climate change at current risks levels are generally and consistently seen to be closer to 60 per cent, to be reached by 2050 (Byrne et al 2002; IPCC 1996). Given that the United States, responsible for 25 per cent of the world's fossil-fuel consumption, is not a Kyoto subscriber, and China, India and other significant emitters in the developing world are exempt from its provisions, the Kyoto process is unlikely to achieve any reduction at all, let alone one approximating the level required to halt climate change. The terms of the various carbon trading schemes in circulation are not aimed at total overall reductions and, paradoxically, can even work to subvert these (Byrne and Glover 2000). The Conferences of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change so far have not changed this tragic picture. They have merely highlighted the limitations of an apparently symbolic process, seen by many as little more than a surrogate for action.

While some argue that a Kyoto-style agreement is not needed since the realities of oil and gas depletion would reduce emissions anyway (supplies are argued to peak and begin to decline globally in 2010 (Campbell 2005)), IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) experts convincingly argued that some if not many nations could move to coal and carbon-intensive nuclear energy in their desperation to compensate for the shortfall, maintaining a politically shackled and ideologically blind stance vis vis renewable power (Coghlan 2003). The general discourse still skirts around the inevitable conclusion, studiously avoided by most decision-makers, that a massive and global turn to renewable sources is both vital and overdue. Fossil peaking and depletion realities are widely accepted even among conservative industry research institutions and have entered the wider discussion. Coal is also widely understood as an evolutionary error even in its 'advanced' state, and carbon capture and storage (CCS) is too flawed a proposition to feature seriously. Yet not enough information on the great shortcomings of uranium has been offered to the general public. The generation of electricity through nuclear fission is both significantly greenhouse-gas emitting and faces a firm depletion horizon, besides being fraught with massive and very long-term health and proliferation dangers. Because even 'high-grade' uranium contains only 0.2 per cent uranium oxide it is exceptionally energy-intensive to mine and process: it takes up to a decade for a power station to compensate for the energy embodied in its refined fuel and plant. At current use levels, high-grade uranium ore will have been depleted by 2025 much of it procured from decommissioned warheads. And with low-grade uranium the entire nuclear-fuel cycle generates more greenhouse gas than a natural gas-fired power station (Green 2005).

While Kyoto and the ensuing carbon trading schemes attract much attention yet deliver little action, the rapid changes in the earth's climate cause increasing and irreversible damage to the terrestrial ecosystem. While ever larger environmental conferences are held with decreasingly tangible results, cities' risk-management costs rise dramatically, in social, economic and physical terms. The local consequences of climate change have begun to challenge municipal planning and governance arrangements, and bring their very viability into question. And if the present, free-wheeling global course of mounting energy demand is maintained, the inevitable decrease in oil and gas production levels will wreak havoc on the global, highly urbanised economy, cause steep price rises and destabilise cities, the world's central and insatiable nodes of fossil fuel consumption.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Renewable Cityby Peter Droege Copyright © 2006 by Peter Droege. Excerpted by permission.
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