Towns and Cities targeting Net Zero.
Frederikhavn is a coastal town with a population of 23,295 with a plan to become zero carbon by 2030. The town and district already used twenty percent renewable energy in 2006. The annual energy demand per person was around 0.025 MWh/p/yr and about thirty percent energy use is attributed to transport. “Energy City Frederikshavn has the main responsibility for creating growth in the field of “energy” by creating a ‘demonstratorium’ for the testing of sustainable climate and energy technologies in the scale 1:1.”
It is proposed that the following technologies are to be used:
Solar powered heating.
- Wind power.
- Waste heat from the wastewater treatment.
- Geothermal heating and storage.
- Bio-gas for transport in the natural gas system.
- Methanol for other vehicles and electric cars.
- Bio diesel and bio gasoline.
The project is led by the local authority and has a secretariat a fund a steering committee and a set of working groups. It employs seven people and has an annual fund of about £330,000 per year.
One exemplar project was a new heat pump at the wastewater treatment plant in Frederikshavn that was connected to the collective district heating system. The heat pump uses cheap, surplus electricity from offshore windmills nearby Frederikshavn and heat from the sewage plant to supply heat for a district-heating network in Frederikshavn, corresponding to approx. 400 households. The heat pump is one of the first of its kind in Denmark. The town is one of a network of enery cities sharing knowldge across europe. Energy Cities
Retrofiting neighbourhoods for Net Zero
At a smaller scale a recent study is Net Zero Neighbourhoods, Redesigning Neigbourhoods for a New Zero by AESG for the LDN Collective (2024). The study is inspired by the need to be resourceful about future energy supply in west London when demand is increasingly taken up by data processing. Evidencing perhaps that waiting for the grid to be decarbonise is a risky route to net zero.
It identifies 10 key principles for net zero neighbourhoods; optimisation, building fabric, heat networks, renewable energy, demand response and energy storage, socio economic benefit, funding mechanisims, local authority engagement and digitisation and automation.
Ten case studies span 30 years of strategic energy projects including the solar city at Vauban, Germany from 1995 and False Creek, Vancouver from 2010 that recovers waste heat from water. Neighbourhood intiative in the UK include ‘Energise Barnsley’, Yorkshire and ‘Kensa Heat the Streets’, Cornwall that use solar PV and ground source heat respecively at a neighbourhood scale.
Hear one of the authours of the study Sam Luker talk about the work with Ross 0′ Ceallaigh on the Green Urbanist Podcast.
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Revised 2021 (Updated December 2024)
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