The assessment of regional bioenergy potentials from different types of natural land cover is an integral part of simulation tools that aim to assess local renewable energy systems. This work introduces a new workflow, which evaluates regional bioenergy potentials and its impact on water demand based on geographical information system (GIS)-based land use data, satellite maps on local crop types and soil types, and conversion factors from biomass to bioenergy. The actual annual biomass yield of crops is assessed through an automated process considering the factors of local climate, crop type, soil, and irrigation. The crop biomass yields are validated with historic statistical data, with deviation less than 7% in most cases. Additionally, the resulting bioenergy potentials yield between 10.7 and 12.0 GWh/ha compared with 13.3 GWh/ha from other studies. The potential contribution from bioenergy on the energy demand were investigated in the two case studies, representing the agricultural-dominant rural area in North Germany and suburban region in South Germany: Simulation of the future bioenergy potential for 2050 shows only smaller effects from climate change (less than 4%) and irrigation (below 3%), but the potential to cover up to 21% of the transport fuels demand in scenario supporting biodiesel and bioethanol for transportation.
Humans’ activities in urban areas put a strain on local water resources. This paper introduces a method to accurately simulate the stress urban water demand in Germany puts on local resources on a single-building level, and scalable to regional levels without loss of detail. The method integrates building geometry, building physics, census, socio-economy and meteorological information to provide a general approach to assessing water demands that also overcome obstacles on data aggregation and processing imposed by data privacy guidelines. Three German counties were used as validation cases to prove the feasibility of the presented approach: on average, per capita water demand and aggregated water demand deviates by less than 7% from real demand data. Scenarios applied to a case region Ludwigsburg in Germany, which takes the increment of water price, aging of the population and the climate change into account, show that the residential water demand has the change of −2%, +7% and −0.4% respectively. The industrial water demand increases by 46% due to the development of economy indicated by GDP per capita. The rise of precipitation and temperature raise the water demand in non-residential buildings (excluding industry) of 1%.
Abstract. This paper explains the first insights into the ongoing development of a CityGML based Food Water Energy Application Domain Extension (FWE ADE). Cities are undergoing rapid expansion throughout the globe. As a result, they face a common challenge to provide food, water and energy (FWE) supplies under healthy and economically productive conditions. Consequently, new tools and techniques must be developed to support decision-makers, such as governments, public or private infrastructure providers, investors and city developers, to understand, quantify and visualise multiple interdependent impacts for the sustainable supply of the FWE resources. However, a common practice amongst these stakeholders is to work in their data silos, which frequently results in a lack of data integration and communication between domain specific simulation tools belonging to different infrastructure departments. As a result, insights related to critical indicators showing inter-dependency amongst different urban infrastructure are missed and hence, not included in the cities’ redevelopment action plan. This paper documents the first ongoing attempt by an international group of domain experts from food, water, energy, urban design and geoinformatics to harmonise the data silos of food, water and energy domain for the case study regions of the County of Ludwigsburg in Germany, the city of Vienna in Austria and the neighbourhood of Gowanus in New York, the United States of America.
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