Innovative approaches for the deployment of Positive Energy Districts

No, the import of energy should not compensate for a lack of energy production within the district on a yearly basis. The topic text requires an ‘Increased number of approaches and solutions enabling a net positive yearly energy balance at district level and the export of excess renewable energy to the grid outside its geographical boundaries,…’. This allows for the import of energy produced outside the geographical boundaries of the PED to compensate for shortages inside the PED during certain times of day or times of year. The energy produced on a yearly basis within the geographical boundaries of the PEDs should exceed the yearly energy demand of the PED. As such, the ambition of the topic is to go beyond “virtual PEDs” towards PEDs that actually achieve a net positive energy balance on a yearly basis within the geographical boundaries of the PED and exchange energy with the wider grid into which it is integrated.

A helpful categorisation of different of PEDs was developed and published by the Horizon 2020 project CityxChange (824260).

This topic starts from the observation that the feasibility of PEDs has been demonstrated by recent projects. Nevertheless, their deployment is still hindered by technical, business, social and organisational constraints that need to be addressed. The topic text provides a non-exhaustive list of these constraints of which several are clearly technological. It is however up to the proposers to define the constraints that they want to address in their proposal and which technological and/or non-technological approaches and solutions they propose for overcoming them.

The white Paper on “Reference Framework for Positive Energy Districts and Neighbourhoods” prepared by JPI Urban Europe and SET-Plan 3.2 Programme of March 2020, provides a helpful definition of a Positive Energy District. The definition refers to “energy-efficient and energy-flexible urban areas or groups of connected buildings”, but does not provide restrictive indications in terms of the surface, number of buildings or any other characteristic for an area within a city.

Similarly, the topic text does not prescribe a clear definition for a ‘district’ in terms of surface, number of buildings, etc. but expects these to be “areas that implement energy efficiency measures alongside renewable energy installations, storage solutions, digital and smart technologies, and local energy communities”.

Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that the experts will assess whether the proposed districts have suitably characteristics that will allow the project to appropriately “demonstrate the proposed approaches, solutions, and supportive local planning frameworks” and to convincingly and significantly contribute to the expected outcomes of this topic, notably to “enabling a net positive yearly energy balance at district level and the export of excess renewable energy to the grid outside its geographical boundaries, with enhanced replicability on a larger scale in other positive energy districts (PEDs) in different contexts”.

No, the import of energy should not compensate for a lack of energy production within the district on a yearly basis. The topic text requires an ‘Increased number of approaches and solutions enabling a net positive yearly energy balance at district level and the export of excess renewable energy to the grid outside its geographical boundaries,…’. This allows for the import of energy produced outside the geographical boundaries of the PED to compensate for shortages inside the PED during certain times of day or times of year. The energy produced on a yearly basis within the geographical boundaries of the PEDs should exceed the yearly energy demand of the PED. As such, the ambition of the topic is to go beyond “virtual PEDs” towards PEDs that actually achieve a net positive energy balance on a yearly basis within the geographical boundaries of the PED and exchange energy with the wider grid into which it is integrated.

A helpful categorisation of different of PEDs was developed and published by the Horizon 2020 project CityxChange (824260) (https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/12/4491)

Previous projects have proven the technical feasibility of PEDs. Topic HORIZON-CL5-2026-02-D4-04 focuses on innovative approaches and solutions to overcome the technical, business, social and organizational constraints in several domains, which prevent the successful implementation of PEDs.