Towards sustainable urban energy systems: High resolution modelling of electricity and heat demand profiles

Urban energy systems are attracting more and more attention owing to the challenges as well as potential to make them more sustainable. In particular, decarbonisation may be achieved by deploying a portfolio of multi-energy technologies (electricity, heat, cooling, gas, transport), for both distributed (e.g., PV, heat pumps, electric vehicles, thermal and electrical storage, etc.) and centralised (e.g., community-level or city-level energy systems supplied by cogeneration, trigeneration, etc.) applications. This calls for high resolution modelling from both temporal and spatial perspectives, suitable to capture infrastructure impact and requirements as well as intertemporal characteristics of new technologies (especially for storage). This paper presents an initial investigation into a modelling approach which provides high spatial and temporal electricity and heat demand profiles taking proper account of various consumption characteristics of different customer sectors, with application to the Greater Manchester's metropolitan area. A general framework for evaluating the different performances and requirements of city-level multi-energy system is also presented.