Benchmarking Energy Sustainability in Cities

Created by

Albana KONA Scientific Project Officer

European Commission - DG JRC, Directorate C - Energy, Transport and Climate

Energy efficiency is a strategic component of urban sustainability. The aim of this workshop is to address benchmarking techniques in energy efficiency and sustainability as a management tool in the context of urban and local community actions towards sustainability. The workshop also identifies and discusses methodologies and tools to measure urban sustainable energy and energy efficiency in cities. It is well known that standard benchmarking techniques, such as per capita or GDP normalization, are missing important features of the collected data used for benchmarking. Rigorous benchmarking techniques are likely to play an increasingly important role for policy-making authorities and for local authorities to assess their energy efficiency actions, to monitor their performance, exchange experience and learn from each other. In order to develop reliable and robust benchmarking techniques, different databases on energy consumption and location should be integrated with statistical and energy performance assessment methodologies. A special session was dedicated to databases, methodologies and GIS based tools for assessing energy sustainability in urban areas.

Recommendations from "Benchmarking Energy Sustainability in Cities"

The scientific workshop “Benchmarking Energy Sustainability in Cities” was organized jointly by the European Commission-JRC and Politecnico di Torino on November 25, 2014 at the Lingotto Hall of Politecnico di Torino in Turin, Italy.

The Workshop brought together international experts to deliberate and share experiences on the challenges and issues of utilizing benchmarking techniques to measure energy efficiency and sustainability in cities.

The total of fifteen presentations that were presented in the three sessions of the Workshop provided different perspectives on the use of benchmarking techniques as a management tool in the context of urban and local community actions towards sustainability, including signatory cities under the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) initiative. Furthermore, the presentations allowed for the identification and evaluation of tools and methodologies to measure urban sustainable energy and energy efficiency in cities.

The three sessions of the scientific workshop were namely “Monitoring Sustainable Energy Action Plans in Cities” (Session 1), “Benchmarking Energy Sustainability in Cities” (Session 2), and “Databases, Methodologies and GIS based Tools for Benchmarking Energy Sustainability in Cities” (Session 3).

The Proceedings of this scientific workshop document the vast array of knowledge and expertise that was presented by the international experts from Europe and abroad together with the key findings and recommendations, which are as summarized below.

Monitoring Sustainable Energy Action Plans in Cities

Recommendation 1: Cities are increasingly in the forefront of making changes in Energy Sustainability. This momentum of cities needs to be supported with adequate policies and increased policy learning with robust benchmarking techniques. Small signatories in CoM need support from regional and provincial agencies through the Covenant territorial coordinators. In addition, there is a need to expand the usage of energy density maps for reliable data on cities and efficient thermal energy networks. Robust methods of benchmarking are needed to let those cities who are performing better inspire other cities.

Recommendation 2: The monitoring of results of Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SEAPs) in cities is necessary to follow-up on the progress that is made by cities towards reaching their CO2 emission reduction targets. The monitoring process is also necessary to keep the energy efficiency and renewable energy measures of the city dynamic and open for improvement with SEAPs being a “living document” Best practices have emphasized the usage of calls for actions to integrate new measures into existing strategies (e.g. Torino) and the matching of companion cities (e.g. Glasgow, Ghent, Riga and Gothenburg) to transfer experiences to relatively more novice cities. The concept of an “Enhanced SEAP” has also been proposed based on a pipeline of integrative approaches leading up to the monitoring stages, including scenario analyses. Beyond the signatory and submission stages of SEAPs, CoM signatory cities should benefit from these best practices in monitoring the results of the measures that are included in the SEAPs.

Recommendation 3: The diffusion of standards for the reporting and monitoring stages may increase spillover for policy learning and benchmarking. In the Workshop, experiences from the carbonn Climate Registry (cCR) and ACEEE City Scorecard among others provided key perspectives for reporting and monitoring practices. The cCR provides flexibility for cities in selecting the indicators on which to report. The ACEEE City Scorecard assigns grades to cities based on the extent of coverage of policy areas in local government operations, buildings, energy and water utilities, transportation, and community-wide measures. At the same time, progress is being made in the standardization process based on the Global Protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventories (GPC), which provides a robust framework for accounting and reporting city-wide greenhouse gas emissions, and ISO 37120:2014 on “Sustainable Development of Communities - Indicators for City Services and Quality of Life.”