Urbanization is happening at a rapid pace on a global level. In 2009, the percentage of the world’s population living in urban areas surpassed 50%, and it is expected to reach 70% by 2050. The changing infrastructure design, urban sprawl and variations in climate affect the energy consumption patterns in cities. We use earlier developed statistical models to estimate change in energy demand in urban areas globally in the categories of heating, cooling, electricity and transportation for 2030 [1-4]. The results show a probable large rise in demand worldwide, particularly tied to decreasing urban density and expected population growth. Particularly, In the US all the categories studied involve an increase except for heating. This growth in energy demand will further increase the need for increasing energy production capacity in and around urban areas. In this work, we study the portfolio of energy production change under different scenarios of adoption of renewable energy adoption. For adoption scenarios of various energy supply sources, we use a genetic algorithm based optimization framework for the potential inclusion of renewable and other distributed energy sources while minimizing costs and environmental impacts. We focus on the ten largest US cities for building this prototype, which reflect an array of supply options. Based on our analysis we provide a preliminary estimate for changes in the demand of conventional energy needs (such as coal and NG based power consumption) for various scenarios of renewable energy adoption in urban areas of the US.
[1] Singh, S., & Kennedy, C. (2015). Estimating future energy use and CO 2 emissions of the world's cities. Environmental Pollution, 203, 271-278.
[2] Kennedy, C.A., Stewart, I., Facchini, A., Cersosimo, I., Mele, R., Chen, B., Uda, M., Kansal, A., Chiu, A., Kim, K.G. and Dubeux, C., 2015. Energy and material flows of megacities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(19), pp.5985-5990.
[3] Isaac, M., & Van Vuuren, D. P. (2009). Modeling global residential sector energy demand for heating and air conditioning in the context of climate change. Energy policy, 37(2), 507-521.
[4] McNeil, M. A., & Letschert, V. E. (2008). Future air conditioning energy consumption in developing countries and what can be done about it: the potential of efficiency in the residential sector. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
