Governance supporting distributed energy systems for low carbon urban development

Abstract

Global change is required from a strong dependency on high consumption and carbon intensive economies to reduced consumption and low carbon society construction. Cities can offer an enormous contribution to the reduction of carbon emissions; however this process requires a certain degree of rethinking and redesigning of our cities including, infrastructural restructuring with network patterns and resource flows that foster low carbon urban development. Distributed systems that support low carbon urban development including, decentralised power, water, waste and transport are becoming popular as a viable alternative or complimentary addition to centralised city services. However, the emerging decentralised systems pose a unique set of risks and this is generating new modes of governance at national, regional and local. The growing interest in distributed energy systems and the parallel transition that is occurring towards multilevel governance, which can support such schemes, will be examined in this paper. A framework will be used to characterise the different governance structures being used to implement decentralised services; and this study will examine how such approaches promise to facilitate delivery, operation and ownership of distributed city services. An assessment will also be made on a series of economic models and business partnerships that are emerging that offer viable structures to manage distributed energy systems in cooperation with local government utilities, investors and corporate entities. This research will investigate how certain regulatory barriers to centralised energy systems can be overcome to allow for large-scale implementation of distributed energy options. The possible governance strategies will be demonstrated with reference to some international and national case studies including Woking and London in the UK and Sydney in Australia, which best exemplify the distributed energy systems' model and the success factors and barriers for its implementation. Finally, the study will discuss the opportunities, challenges and risks that exist for Australia in adoption of such governance schemes, and it will suggest areas where future governance investigation could enhance sustainable planning and development in Australia.