Scale-UP MAKING PEDs
Scaling Up Positive Energy Districts Planning by Digital Twins in Climate Neutral Cities
- Category
- Project
- Call
- DUT Call 2024
- Duration
- –
- Project coordinator
- IREC – Catalonia Institute for Energy Research
The decision-making process for designing Climate Neutral Neighbourhoods and Districts needs to rely on valid and comprehensive data collected at various levels of aggregation and consistently aligned with urban city strategies for climate neutrality. Digital Twins have emerged as key tools, enabling visualization to support informed decision-making and participatory processes while transforming urban areas in complex environments.
The Scale-UP MAKING PEDs project aims to deliver a comprehensive, data-driven framework to support Positive Energy District (PED) implementation across urban areas, addressing both neighbourhood-specific and city-wide applications. . To facilitate strategic and evidence-based decision-making by urban authorities, Scale-UP MAKING PEDs will integrate reliable, micro-level data from diverse physical and digital infrastructures at a city scale.
The Scale-UP MAKING PEDs project will explore key elements for leveraging Digital Twins to support decision-making and participatory processes in transforming urban areas into Climate Neutral Positive Energy Districts (PEDs). It focuses on aligning interoperable 3D CityGML-based Digital Twins with city-wide energy planning strategies. Specific objectives include:
- Embedding PED planning within urban strategies to improve efficiency, sustainability, and resilience
- Expanding existing calculation models to account for several heating and cooling options, district energy networks, future electricity grids and waste heat reuse
- Developing comprehensive frameworks for secure, compliant, and interoperable data across spatial and governance levels
- Enhance existing visualization platform and decision-making algorithms to facilitate integrated planning
- Ensure replicability and scalability across diverse EU cities
Improved Digital Twins will be tested while enabling decision-makers to evaluate Climate Neutral PED scenarios through co-participatory processes in five Urban Living Labs which has diverse social and regulatory contexts.
Digital twins and data-driven models will be refined to support decision-making and participatory urban transformation. These tools will play a central role in regenerating five European districts, serving as Urban Living Labs to achieve climate neutrality. These interoperable data platforms developed will integrate data from various sources (public, private, and research), offering valuable insights for real estate developers, policymakers, and local communities.
By their potential replicability, benefits of Scale-UP Making PEDs outcomes will impact to other neighborhoods in the participant countries and in Europe beyond the participant countries. Beyond digital tools and platforms, the project will produce guidelines, training materials and best-practices documents to facilitate knowledge exchange and promote adoption among other cities and the DUT community. By engaging city authorities, Scale-UP MAKING PEDs will help to sow the seeds of PED concept and strengthen the willingness of PED uptake in other cities and communities
Contact
Jaume Salom
jsalom@irec.cat