Are solar cities feasible? A review of current research

ABSTRACT

Urban ‘polycentric’ experimentation is enabling a new understanding of the sustainability potential of cities across the world. Coupled with the rising prominence of ‘grid parity’ conditions for solar energy, it is becoming clear that cities have abundant opportunities to reconfigure urban energy economies on platforms fuelled mainly and, in a few more years, entirely on energy conservation and renewable (especially solar) energy. Early evidence of the practical application of ‘solar cities’ models suggests the financial feasibility of city-wide development of electricity infrastructures based on conservation and renewables. The results of technical and economic potential investigations capture the promise of the model. But a question remains: how can we realize the investment needed to implement solar cities. We examine three pathways: ‘project-based solar development’; ‘strategic solar development’; and ‘infrastructure-scale solar city development’, focusing in each case on solar electricity development since much of the conservation potential in cities is capable of self-financing (Byrne, J., & Taminiau, J. (2016). A review of sustainable energy utility and energy service utility concepts and applications: Realizing ecological and social sustainability with a community utility. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Energy and Environment, 5(2), 136–154. doi10.1002/wene.171). After review of some of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach, we recommend infrastructure-scale development as the most promising means to attracting city-wide, cost-effective, sustainable energy investment.

KEYWORDS:

• Solar cities
• climate change
• energy finance
• urban planning
• urban sustainability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The economic feasibility of solar PV projects depends on technical, market, and policy factors that affect costs and benefits generated from system installation through operation stages (Byrne et al., 2016). Variables commonly factored in economic analysis of distributed power generation include system type, size, and cost, financing method, profit potential, and policy incentives. Using over two million simulations of variable input profiles, the Monte Carlo analysis of the six case study cities identified solar city opportunities as reasonable when 80% of simulations demonstrated a positive cumulative benefit-to-cost ratio (Byrne et al., 2017). Depending on the duration of financing, all six cities demonstrated a reasonable profile under these terms. Benefit-cost assessment of city-wide solar PV projects in this manner provides a comprehensive and systematic comparison across different project scenarios (Allan, Eromenko, Gilmartin, Kockar, & McGregor, 2015; Drury, Denholm, & Margolis, 2011; Sun et al., 2013).