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Energy Use in Cities A Roadmap For Urban Transitions 1St Ed Edition Stephanie Pincetl Full Chapter
Energy Use in Cities A Roadmap For Urban Transitions 1St Ed Edition Stephanie Pincetl Full Chapter
Energy Use in Cities A Roadmap For Urban Transitions 1St Ed Edition Stephanie Pincetl Full Chapter
“The book provides a unique knowledge resource for researchers, practitioners and
decision-makers alike. It is based on a detailed and novel methodology to interrogate
the socio-spatial features of energy demand across regions and cities, opening the path
for ambitious measures to transform our relationship with energy and infrastructure
in response to the global climate challenge.”
—Stefan Bouzarovski, Professor, Department of Geography, University of
Manchester
“The Energy Atlas provides insightful and detailed information on localized energy
consumption for the City of Los Angeles. As LADWP builds the energy grid of the
future, the Energy Atlas remains vital in the development and incorporation of new
clean technologies into the grid.
The Energy Atlas assists LADWP to better understand building energy consump-
tion across the diverse neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Now, as LADWP begins to
incorporate distributed energy resources, energy storage, and building electrifica-
tion technologies into the grid, UCLA’s Energy Atlas has new importance in
maintaining reliability and managing customer demand.”
—Steve Baule, Director of Sustainable Projects in the Office of Sustainability at
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
“If global society is to overcome climate change, then it needs significant trans-
formation in urban energy systems to occur. With Californian cities leading the
way, Dr. Pincetl and her team have constructed and analyzed the most amazing,
spatially detailed data-sets. They have found solutions to formidable data access
challenges and explored thorny issues of social justice under energy transitions.
This book is essential reading for local governments, planners and academics
looking to build sustainable cities.”
—Chris Kennedy, Chair of Civil Engineering, University of Victoria, Canada
Stephanie Pincetl · Hannah Gustafson ·
Felicia Federico · Eric Daniel Fournier ·
Robert Cudd · Erik Porse
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Howard Choy, Dave Freeman, Ken Alex, Steve
Baule, Michael Peevey, Eric Stokes, Mark Gold, Peter Kareiva, and Amy
Reardon as well as the staff at the Institute of the Environment and
Sustainability at UCLA for their help, support and faith in this project.
Mary Hardin, Julia Skrovan, and Lauren Strug provided invaluable edito-
rial contributions and Sean Kennedy some invaluable analysis. A special
thanks must go to Dan Cheng who spent nearly four years working on
the Atlas, developing creative solutions to gnarly problems. Her cheer,
and consistently positive attitude made an enormous difference. Alex
Ricklefs was a great addition to the team as well. Studio NAND, our
website developer based in Berlin, has been an integral partner in this
venture, providing beautiful, smooth, and sophisticated web develop-
ment, making the Atlas what it is. We are also only as far along as the
previous Atlas team enabled: special thanks goes to Zoe Elizabeth, one of
the first staff and manager of the Atlas 1.0, Jackie Murphy who created the
first beta map, Rob Graham, our first programmer, Sinnott Murphy and
Deepak Sivaraman who also participated in the initial Atlas development.
Finally, this book and our work would not have been possible without
the ongoing support of the Anthony & Jeanne Pritzker Family Foun-
dation for the California Center for Sustainable Communities at UCLA,
spearheaded by Dr. Pincetl.
v
Contents
1 Introduction 1
About the Chapters 3
Bibliography 6
vii
viii CONTENTS
Summary 83
Bibliography 84
6 Data Analytics 85
Data-Driven Decision-Making 85
How Data Is Transforming Science 86
How Data Is Transforming Society 87
Utility Customer Data 88
Utility Company Internal Customer Data Use Cases 89
Barriers to Third-Party Access 92
Revisiting Utility Customer Data Aggregation Rules 93
Ethical Implications of Utility Customer Data Access
Decisions 95
Third-Party Utility Customer Data Request Procedures 98
Utility Customer Data Analytics 99
Working with Utility Customer Data at Scale 99
Verifying Utility Customer Data Integrity 103
Putting Consumption into Context 105
Detecting Significant Changes in Historical Consumption 106
Forecasting Future Consumption Levels 110
Utility Customer Data Models Versus Descriptions 112
Modeling Applications 113
Minimum Data Requirements 114
Future Research Questions 115
Bibliography 116
8 Conclusion 157
Supporting Local Government Progress on the Energy
Transition 157
Regulatory Impediments 158
Insights from Data-Driven Research 160
CONTENTS xi
Glossary 171
Index 177
List of Figures
xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES
xv
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
explain, these proprietary claims seriously limit the use of granular energy
consumption data for public decision-making, and are now proving to be
a significant obstacle to the achievement of the state’s sustainability goals.
In California, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from building stock
vary across the state, and by time of day and season, but overall, building
energy use accounts for 25% of the state’s emissions (Mahone et al. 2019).
Globally, buildings account for nearly 40% of cities’ GHG emissions and
40% of their total energy use (International Energy Agency and the
United Nations Environment Program 2018). Consequently, knowledge
of building energy usage patterns and an understanding of their under-
lying drivers are fundamental to developing policy strategies for reduction
of energy consumption and GHG emissions.
When we first began our work to document energy use in cities, we
found ourselves lacking the data needed to inform the energy transition
in a scientifically rigorous manner and help enable the implementation of
effective public policy. Not only did we university researchers not have the
information we needed to pursue our own research questions, but local
governments—charged with saving energy for their residents—could not
even obtain energy data on their own municipal operations from the util-
ities, let alone building energy consumption data for their populations.
As the lack of access had become an increasingly significant obstacle to
energy research and policy implementation efforts, we moved to partic-
ipate in public debates about the rights of different entities to access
building energy data. We pushed for, and participated in, a state level
regulatory process (described in more depth in subsequent chapters) that
eventually gave universities access to building energy consumption data,
although extensive challenges still remain to this day. What we present in
this book is the outcome of that engagement: the UCLA Energy Atlas.
The UCLA Energy Atlas is a spatial-temporal record of the energy
consumed by and within the built environment. The Atlas links energy
consumption from utility billing data to tax assessor’s parcels using
addresses; making statistical, geographic, and chronological analyses of
energy consumption possible. It consists of two parts: a back-end
database, and a public facing, interactive web map, and data visualization
platform. The back-end database, on which the Energy Atlas website is
based, contains hundreds of millions of records of historical consump-
tion at the address level; it enables a wide array of research projects
related to decarbonizing building energy use, which in turn serve to
inform state and local government policies. The public web map displays
1 INTRODUCTION 3
Bibliography
Mahone, A., Li, C., Subin, Z., Sontag, M., Mantegna, G., & Karolides,
A. (2019). Residential Building Electrification in California Consumer
Economics, Greenhouse Gases and Grid Impacts. www.ethree.com.
CHAPTER 2
Introduction
Cities are now the primary habitat for human beings. For the first time in
our history, most humans live in these areas across the globe, and cities
are increasingly being recognized as important venues within which to
pursue the reduction of humanity’s impacts on the environment (Evans
2019). Cities are accumulations of many of the Earth’s rarest materials.
Often mined and processed in distant places; these materials are assembled
and embedded in city systems so that their unique physical and chemical
properties can be leveraged to provide shelter, jobs, and enable the opera-
tion of many types of infrastructure. Cities rely on continuous input flows
of energy: electricity, natural gas, and other hydrocarbons, which enable
the heating and cooling of buildings, propulsion of vehicles, and func-
tioning of machinery. As humanity has become increasingly urbanized and
reliant on infrastructural systems, concomitant advances in computational
technology now promise tantalizing solutions to previously intractable
infrastructural management problems. However, to “optimize” the func-
tioning of infrastructural systems, we require data from and about those
systems. Accordingly, we now exist in an era of “smart” and “sensored”
cities (Kitchin 2014a, b; Marvin et al. 2018). Naturally, the type and avail-
ability of data affects the character and orientation of a wide range of
policy processes, including sustainability policy. Furthermore, the content
and form of relevant data; its granularity, whether it is designated as
1 There are a few exceptions such as Gainesville Florida and Cambridge MA where
property-level energy consumption data are publicly available. The International Energy
Agency is working to develop a building energy “epidemiology” knowledge base through
its Annex 70 research effort with the goal of characterizing building energy use, but even
in Europe, building energy use reporting is not available at the building scale.
10 S. PINCETL ET AL.
The lack of data is not the result of its absence—utilities must collect it
in order to bill customers. Rather, utilities consider these data proprietary;
key to internal operations and decisions. Generally speaking, utilities
prefer not to have outside entities—the public, researchers, regulatory
bodies—meddle in their internal decision-making processes, which rely
on information extracted from millions of customer bills. Utilities, by and
large, have been very successful in providing essential services—electricity
and natural gas—at affordable prices, with few major breakdowns, black-
outs or service interruptions—though this track record is likely to come
under increasing stress as climate events accelerate. At the same time,
electricity generation and natural gas impose considerable externalities
on society, including pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Moreover,
there is a strong correlation between affluence and consumption, which
also has societal impacts due to infrastructure requirements. Carefully and
parsimoniously shifting to a decarbonized energy system is very much in
the public’s interest, but the scale and extraordinary complexity of the
infrastructural systems involved requires that robust, disaggregated energy
consumption data be readily available.
That energy consumption data has been by and large proprietary has
negatively affected the ability of regulators to deeply understand patterns
of energy use by socioeconomic groups, and the relationship of that use to
income for electricity and natural gas. Further there are important issues
regulators should better understand for themselves, related to grid infras-
tructure and capacity, local renewable energy generation potential in any
given urban morphology, and the possibilities of storage. Each of these
has important implications for the future of energy generation and use,
and opaque to most PUCs, other regulators and researchers due to the
lack of data. Further there are enormous possibilities to better understand
commercial and industrial energy use as well, and to target efficiency
programs as more is known about the different sectors and how they
might compare among themselves. None of this possible without granular
data about building energy use.
Therefore, to plan for equitable and “smart” energy transitions,
knowing exactly how and how much energy is utilized in buildings, by
whom and where, is critical for precise policy interventions, i.e., targeting
programs, incentives, initiatives and investments according to the driver
(building age, appliances, or other). Distinctions between building types
and residents’ sociodemographic characteristics are also important for
evaluating the performance of energy efficiency programs, which are
2 THE LARGER CONTEXT, CITIES, SMART AND BIG DATA 11
market and policy changes pertaining to the energy supply and utility
operations.2
In California today, the state has developed greenhouse gas emissions
reduction mandates for electricity generation, requiring the utilities to
purchase increasing increments of power generated by renewable sources
of energy, as well as to fund energy efficiency programs to reduce demand.
These energy efficiency programs (EE) form an important part of the
state’s approach to reducing building energy use. EE incentives are
funded by revenue collected from ratepayers, designated by the California
PUC (CPUC) for the purpose, and implemented through an array of
different programs and partners. The CPUC has constructed a complex
set of requirements and regulations to govern each of the interacting
aspects of the mandatory regulations from the state, such as the renewable
energy portfolio, and program implementation such as the EE incentives.
Much attention has been focused on electricity generation where alter-
natives are available, but natural gas use (also under the umbrella of the
PUC) in homes and industrial processes remains endemic and difficult to
supplant. It is an inexpensive energy source and extensive infrastructure
exists to distribute it. Most homes, at least in California, have natural gas
appliances that rely on that infrastructure. Natural gas still serves a crit-
ical need for generation of electricity, making up for the intermittency in
renewable energy (solar and wind), and night time generation due to the
state’s lack of renewable energy storage. Shifts toward greater electrifica-
tion will result in stranded assets for natural gas utilities, and expenses for
households that must replace their appliances, as well as potentially higher
utility bills. Transportation electrification will lead to yet more changes
and impacts. These are among the complex tradeoffs that PUCs are grap-
pling with, but without the tools and information that would otherwise
enable them to truly understand the distribution of building energy use
and important explanatory variables.
One might ask why, given the importance of consumption data for
policy implementation, it has not been made more widely available? In
California access came only due to pressure from local governments, the
2 PUCs were created in the early twentieth century to regulate private monopolies and
ensure that those dependent on their services were charged affordable and fair rates. They
were to further ensure that the monopoly shareholders received a fair rate of return, and
that utility rates could provide the utilities with enough revenue to upgrade and maintain
their infrastructure.
2 THE LARGER CONTEXT, CITIES, SMART AND BIG DATA 13
governments that want more control over their electricity sources, more
renewable power than is offered by the default utility, and/or lower elec-
tricity prices. These new entrants add an additional layer of complexity to
the state’s energy system (Fig. 2.1).
The conventional large-scale grid systems that move energy across long
distances are owned and operated by the regulated utilities. They cover
huge geographic distances and are increasingly vulnerable to the impacts
of climate change, such as wildfires. A predicted increase in the number
of extreme heat days will strain existing capacity and reduce transmission
efficiency (Burillo et al. 2019). Distributed, time-dependent renewable
energy production also makes balancing supply and demand more chal-
lenging, exemplified by the so-called “duck curve.” Periodic oversupply of
electricity has led California to pay other states to take it. Growing defec-
tions from the grid made possible by microgrids and localized storage are
also impacting the system.
Table 2.1 Major laws, regulations, and rules governing California’s energy
system and its transformation
(continued)
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