Energy Demand in Sustainable Cities

The first of a 4-part series on energy design for sustainable cities. It starts with reducing energy demand.

Energy Demand in Sustainable Cities @edenicity

To download the Reference Design, visit https://www.edenicity.com/design.html

Sustainable energy starts with demand
0:36 Energy basics
1:19 US energy use
2:53 Transportation
5:17 Buildings
8:41 Industry
9:14 Adding it up

Images and Sources:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/commodities/energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport#
https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/heat-pump-market
Original Passivhaus, Darmstadt, in spring. CC by SA 3.0 Passivhaus Institut, Germany, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Passivhaus_Darmstadt_Kranichstein_Fruehling_2006.JPG
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricity-use-in-homes.php
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1042111/single-family-vs-multifamily-homes-usa/
Green Roof Image, CC by SA 3.0 2008 by Tony the Tiger, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20080708_Chicago_City_Hall_Green_Roof.JPG

Deaths by Transportation Mode

Remaining images and video courtesy Pexels.

The less energy a city needs the easier it is to supply that energy sustainably as we’ll see today design arranging built objects in relation to one another is the single most important factor in reducing a city’s energy demand the beauty of design is that it can accomplish many things at once the same

Design that can make a city 88% more energy efficient can also make it far safer healthier wealthier and better for the planet welcome to edity best practices for sustainably abundant cities energy comes in lots of forms so there’s many ways to measure it there’s Jewels kilowatt hours calories British

Thermal units or BTUs we’ll talk a lot about those today quads the list goes on power is how quickly you use energy and one watt of power is one Jewel of energy per second a kilowatt hour that you see on your electric bill is equal to 3,600,000

Jews a kilowatt hour is also equal to 3,412 British thermal units or BTUs and a quad is a quadrillion BTUs which is equal to 1,55 pjws or about 10 to the 18th Jewels here’s the energy production in use for the United States in 2022 it’s one of many sanki diagrams prepared

By Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories see the description below for the link Lawrence Livermore has also created sanki diagrams for many US states and many other countries over a span of quite a few years but look at this two3 of the energy that’s produced in the United States is rejected what

Does that mean anytime you convert energy from one form to another or move it around some of it is lost to heat this is rejected energy the more efficient your energy production conversion and transmission the less energy you’ll lose the US’s 33% efficiency is actually pretty low compared to many other countries let’s

Convert these US Energy numbers to something a person can relate to we take the total us energy use convert it to kilowatt hours divide it by 12 months and then divide it by the population of the US to get the average kilowatt hours per person per month that are used in

The United States now if you look at your electric bill you’ll realize that 2,400 kwatt hours per person per month is actually really a lot but remember this includes all the energy you use in your home as well as transportation and all the energy that went into to making

Everything that you buy and powering all the activities you engage in the total US Energy consumed came to about 100 quads in 2022 now a quarter of that was lost in electric energy generation and transmission before anyone could put it to use we’ll talk about electricity

Supply in the next episode but for now let’s focus on demand topping our list is transportation and this is an area where we can really see the power of design remember our design is carfree and multif family meaning no no detached houses that alone lets us increase the

Urban density the number of people per square kilm or mile by a factor of four these design choices also make the city far safer Greener and four times quieter so it feels less crowded how much energy do these design choices save us on Transportation density is dwellings per

Area and area is the square of distance so at four times the density all trips are half the distance that’s going to cut our energy use in half right there in addition to that mixed development puts shopping schools dining clinics and many jobs within walking distance that

Cuts motor vehicle trips by at least another 50% Inter City rail uses 14% as much energy as cars multiplying these factors together Cuts our transportation energy use by an astonishing 96.5% at least within the city that cuts the amount of energy a person uses for transportation from 1,600 kwatt hours

Per month down to 57 kwatt hours per month now in the early days as cities upgrade to edity their main focus will be supplying their own energy not anything beyond the city it’s call this edity Phase 1 cities that are upgrading to edity would be wise to link to inter

City bus or rail networks as soon as possible rail uses 86% less energy than cars it’s also 17 times safer 10 times cheaper and somewhat faster than cars for Inter City trips up to 1,000 km at this point I made a detailed model mod of eonity including Inter City rail with

These assumptions on any given day about 20% of the population makes a round trip by tram and 16% makes a round trip by Metro remember far more people are walking or biking because of how the city is designed in addition to that the average person travels about 40 inter

City legs by rail per year just for perspective a oneway coast to coast trip would be about 15 inter city legs worth of travel with these assumptions the model gave a total Total Transportation energy demand of 65 kwatt hours per person per month pretty close to my

Estimate of 57 so let’s include Inter City rail in Phase One of ionicity now if you’re wondering about long-distance air travel I’m saving that for phase two which I’ll discuss three episodes from now what about buildings commercial and residential buildings consume a total of 22% of the energy we use going from

Single family detached houses to multifam mixed use homes saves energy in four ways there’s only a third as much exposed roof area per resident there’s half as many walls to insulate there’s less volume to light heat and cool because of shared amenities such as gyms libraries hobby rooms pools dining and

Entertainment and the shared equipment such as restaurant kitchens is higher efficiency due to economies of scale now I would contend that most apartments and townhouses today don’t make full use of items three and four but even so they consume 52% less energy than detached houses that make up the vast majority of

Dwellings in the United States going all in on items three and four I think the Improvement could go as high as 55% in addition to that since buildings spend 30% of their energy on Heating and Cooling better insulation and a tighter building envelope could bring that way

Down the passive house standard is 80% but it comes with significant limitations on Landscaping orientation and air handling 50% gives us a lot more flexibility in a high situation 50% of 30% is a 15% savings now that we’ve made it easier to heat and cool a space we

Can actually use better technology to do so a highquality heat pump is three times more energy efficient than the baseboard or gas heat that’s found in 87% of us houses where I live upgrading to a heat pump would cut my energy use by 32% 87% of that 32% is 28% rounding

Down the next biggest item to improve is Lighting in its amazing how many buildings still use fluorescent bulbs or even in some cases incandescent lights upgrading these to LEDs more than doubles lighting efficiency lighting accounts for 10% of Home energy use so upgrading the lights can save 5% green

Roofs which are a major part of the ethnicity concept can cool a building’s roof by as much as 18° C in the summer that’s 34° fit and provide a little extra insulation in the winter shade and condensation effects on tree leaves as well as the extra moisture in the soil

Due to the presence of trees in the landscape moderates neighborhood temperatures by similar amounts in temperate climates this could easily cut the number of days where people use air conditioning in half and reduce heating by a little bit in the winter since air conditioning alone is 16% of the typical

Household energy budget Landscaping can save us at least 8% so far this is all proven technology available at scale perfect for phase one in a few episodes I’ll discuss emerging technologies that may improve these number numbers a little bit in phase two let’s add these up actually you can’t let me show you

Why if you had two items that saved you 80% and 50% it’s not true that together they would save you 130% that’s just not physical that it would give you back more than you started with instead what we need to do is take the amount actually remaining after you take out

Each of the discounts then take those remaining amounts and multiply them together so for example 50% of 20% is 10% that works out to a 90% savings this is actually what I did in the way I phrased the transportation numbers earlier now for buildings the Energy

Savings add up like this and as you can see edity homes use 76% less energy in Phase 1 okay let’s look at industry actually edenic won’t focus at all on industry in Phase 1 just buildings transportation and agriculture now there is a bit of a gray area phase one may

Include Light Industry but this will probably behave like commercial buildings which I’ve already discussed edity won’t power heavy Industries until Phase 2 when these large industrial areas in Gray come online I’ll cover those in a later episode and while I have this graphic up I want to emphasize

Again that yes this is a grid but no when you lay it out on a landscape that’s curvy it won’t be grided at all it’s just much easier to understand and draw a grid let’s add up the energy demand for edity Phase 1 we’re just looking at buildings and transportation

When we do that we see that we’ve reduced our energy Demand by 88% and if the whole country did this we would go from 50 quads down to six quads here’s the wild part the US already generates eight quads with sustainable energy with wind hydro and solar so we’re already

Within the renewable energy production budget of the United States today here are those numbers in terms of personal energy use instead of using 3600 kilowatt hours per person per month ethinicity gets us down to 450 kilowatt hours per person per month that’s how much edity needs to generate the real

Question is can it do that within city limits with renewable energy we’ll figure that out in the next episode take care Stay Green see you next time