Cities account for about 66 percent of global final energy consumption and more than 75 percent of global CO2 emissions, making the green transition of city energy systems central to reaching climate targets. Energy Modelling Lab is supervising a PhD project on city energy planning, using Gothenburg as a case study. The PhD, titled “Policy-driven long-term development of city energy systems,” is being written by Kushagra Gupta at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, under the supervision of Professor Erik Ahlgren.
The research investigates how Gothenburg’s energy plans drive the long-term development of the city’s energy system, how these plans coordinate with national climate targets, and how resources can be optimally allocated across competing sectors during the transition. To support this analysis, Energy Modelling Lab built TIMES-NE, a tailored model representing a Northern European city across the heating, electricity and transport sectors from 2018 to 2050, with a temporal resolution of 12 by 24 time slices to capture seasonal and hourly variation. The city is divided into multiple segments based on demographics, and the model takes an integrated supply and demand approach that captures competition for resources across sectors as well as customer perspectives on investment decisions.
The project tests four scenarios for the city’s energy system. A reference scenario extends the current system forward, including already adopted national policies such as energy and carbon taxes and transport sector obligations. A City Energy Plan scenario applies the goals set out in the Gothenburg Energy Plan 2021 to 2030. Two further scenarios translate Sweden’s national climate targets and its EU Effort Sharing Regulation commitments into targets for the city, so that Gothenburg’s energy plan can be tested against these different framings of ambition.
TIMES-NE is built on the TIMES energy systems modelling framework developed under the IEA-ETSAP programme. It represents a Northern European city across the heating, electricity and transport sectors from 2018 to 2050, at a resolution of 12 by 24 time slices to capture seasonal and hourly variation, with the city divided into segments based on demographics.
The model takes an integrated approach that captures both supply and demand sides together, along with the competition for resources between sectors and the customer perspective on investment decisions, rather than treating supply and demand in isolation as most studies do.
The work is being completed as a PhD at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, supervised by Professor Erik Ahlgren and Kenneth Karlsson, running from 2021 to 2026.
Client: Not applicable (PhD supervision)
Reference: Not applicable
Collaborators: Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
EML team: Kenneth Karlsson
Budget: Not stated
Duration: 2021 to 2026
Model: TIMES-NE city model