Towards CO₂ Neutral Urban Planning: Presenting the Rotterdam Energy Approach and Planning (REAP)

Abstract

By the year 2025 Rotterdam aims to have halved its CO2 emissions; an ambitious plan that will require a revolutionary approach to urban areas. One proactive response to this challenge is an exploratory study of the Hart van Zuid area. An interdisciplinary team has investigated how to tackle CO2-issues in a structured way. This has resulted in the Rotterdam Energy Approach and Planning (REAP) methodology. REAP supports initial demand for energy, propagates the use of waste streams and advocates use of renewable energy sources to satisfy the remaining demand. REAP can be applied at all levels: individual buildings, clusters of buildings and even whole neighbourhoods. Applying REAP to the Hart van Zuid has shown that this existing area can become CO2 neutral. Best of all: REAP can be applied everywhere.

Urban Planning for a Renewable Energy Future: Methodological Challenges and Opportunities from a Design Perspective

“…Taking into account the observations made in Section 2, a fairly new branch of research called energy potential mapping investigates the opportunities for optimized exergetic use of available energy sources at the urban and regional scale levels [20,24,31,54]. Hereby the spatial aspect of energy potentials becomes critical for two reasons.…”

“…This is a three-step method for increasing the sustainability of energy systems by respectively 1° reducing the demand for energy, 2° applying renewable energy sources wherever possible and 3° filling in the remaining need as efficiently and cleanly as possible with fossil fuels. However, thinking of a renewable energy future and taking into account the exergy aspects mentioned above, a new version of the trias has meanwhile been proposed by van den Dobbelsteen and worked out in several research projects [20,31].…”

“…This altered trias or 'New Stepped Strategy' maintains the first step of the original sequence, inserts a new one and converts the fossil fuel part into a temporary, transitional step as follows ( [20], p. 12):…”

“…One example is the combustion of high quality fossil fuels to provide for low quality energy applications such as space heating or cooling [18,20,21]. Or expressed in numbers, a typical home boiler burns natural gas at temperatures of over 1000 °C to provide space heating of around 20 °C.…”

Incorporating Renewable Energy Science in Regional Landscape Design: Results from a Competition in The Netherlands

“…This is already being applied and has considerable potential. On a larger scale, the spatial organization of the built environment can also be adapted to facilitate residual heat exchange between industry and housing, for example [22,44].…”