Buildings & Energy

RESEARCH OVERVIEW

Distributed energy generation-incorporating efficiency, local renewables and combined heat and power systems-has the potential to enhance cities’ environmental, health, and wellbeing outcomes. Specifically, it has the power to enhance supply reliability during extreme events, promote energy efficiency and conservation, reduce GHG emissions, curb air pollution, and minimize power generation’s water withdrawal intensity, all while helping to reliably meet peak demand.

To advance understanding of how best to leverage distributed energy systems, the network’s research efforts are exploring the social and institutional factors that enable (or inhibit) distributed energy deployment at the community scale. The network’s efforts are also examining the necessary levels of participation by, and coordination of, individual users as well as appropriate mechanisms for overcoming the legal and financing barriers to wider deployment.

The network is also investigating the technical requirements of broader distributed energy system deployment, including the challenge of integrating distributed and centralized energy systems across scales. Key elements of the network’s technical research include design and testing of hardware interfaces, integration controls, and stochastic models that explore longer time scales, more complex system configurations and inter-system integration, such as energy & water system integration. Researchers are also developing more detailed urban energy models that consider the spatial distribution of power demand, loads, storage and generation over space and time.