‘Energy landscapes’: Meeting energy demands and human aspirations

Abstract

Renewable energy will play a crucial role in the future society of the 21st century. The various renewable energy sources need to be balanced and their use carefully planned since they are characterized by high temporal and spatial variability that will pose challenges to maintaining a well balanced supply and to the stability of the grid. This article examines the ways that future ‘energy landscapes’ can be modelled in time and space. Biomass needs a great deal of space per unit of energy produced but it is an energy carrier that may be strategically useful in circumstances where other renewable energy carriers are likely to deliver less. A critical question considered in this article is whether a massive expansion in the use of biomass will allow us to construct future scenarios while repositioning the ‘energy landscape’ as an object of study. A second important issue is the utilization of heat from biomass energy plants. Biomass energy also has a larger spatial footprint than other carriers such as, for example, solar energy. This article seeks to provide a bridge between energy modelling and spatial planning while integrating research and techniques in energy modelling with Geographic Information Science. This encompasses GIS, remote sensing, spatial disaggregation techniques and geovisualization. Several case studies in Austria and Germany demonstrate a top-down methodology and some results while stepwise calculating potentials from theoretical to technically feasible potentials and setting the scene for the definition of economic potentials based on scenarios and assumptions.

Balanced renewable energy scenarios: a method for making spatial decisions despite insufficient data, illustrated by a case study of the Vorderland-Feldkirch Region, Vorarlberg, Austria

“…Those "energy landscapes" require modelling in time and space, both for the energy demand side and production potentials [15]. The research of Blaschke has been especially focused on biomass but has generally pointed out that energy scenarios need to combine GIS, spatial disaggregation techniques, and geovisualization.…”

GIS-Based Planning and Modeling for Renewable Energy: Challenges and Future Research Avenues

“…From a more general point of view, integrating GIS with energy system modeling enables the generation of a more complete picture of the overall energy system and future -energy landscapes‖ [26]. We claim that it is not enough to consider space and time as additional parameters, but in fact, space and time need to be fully integrated into energy system modeling processes in order to better understand the spatio-temporal dynamics of, for instance, energy demand, availability and the effectiveness of conventional and renewable resources, capacity and load-patterns of energy infrastructures, including decentralized energy storages and, finally, the return of investments and economic profitability.…”

Multiple transformations: theorizing energy vulnerability as a socio-spatial phenomenon

“…Despite using spatial metaphors, however, the MLP has been criticized for failing to provide 'formal attention to space, place and geographical scale' (Bridge et al 2013, 333), resulting in efforts to think about energy transitions through an explicitly spatial heuristic. Correspondingly, the notion of 'energy landscape' -as a set of interconnected social, material and cultural elements nested in notions of place, community and identity -has been employed to highlight the mechanisms through which energy flows are spatially embedded while integrating social and physical systems (Blaschke et al 2013;Bouzarovski 2009;Castán Broto, Salazar, and Adams 2014;Soini et al 2011); and studies of urban energy policies have highlighted the presence of specific socio-technical constellations and power dynamics within the built structures of cities (Bulkeley, Luque-Ayala, and Silver 2014;Rohracher and Späth 2014).…”