Urban areas house most of the global population and are also responsible for large shares of global greenhouse gas emissions. Cities and municipalities thus play a significant role in modern society to achieve an energy transition to renewable energy sources and to adapt to climate change. Achieving such a transition is a difficult process due to the high energy density and complexity of urban multi-energy systems. This is further exacerbated by the adverse effect future climate hazards will likely have on urban infrastructure. Despite this, energy development and climate adaptation plans are often researched and drafted in a disjointed manner. In many instances, future energy strategies do not consider climate impacts, whereas climate adaptation tactics disregard energy production. This study proposed that such mutually exclusive analysis and decision-making increases the vulnerability of planned and optimised future urban energy systems. Investigating the Swedish municipality Malmö, the study focused on achieving a future energy transition in its electricity network and then considering potential climate change impacts. Current urban energy plans and capacity were used to forecast the renewable energy potential for 2030 in Malmö’s geographical area. This formed the basis for modelling an optimised hybrid renewable energy system for the municipality using HOMER Grid. Based on future climate data and Malmö’s climate adaptation plans, this system was then evaluated in terms of impacts from climate hazards. The results indicated that Malmö’s current energy plans would expose a large share of their energy infrastructure to risk of damage from climate hazards. Thus, the vulnerability of the optimised energy system is indeed heightened when disregarding climate change impacts in the planning phase. If climate change and energy transition strategies are developed conjointly, urban energy system resilience could likely be increased significantly.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-503977 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Fabris, Julia |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Institutionen för geovetenskaper |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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