Urban-scale flexibility and climate impact assessment on urban energy systems | Alejandro Zabala Figueroa

Field l Discipline

• Environmental Sciences
• Economics, General
• Energy & Fuels
• Social Sciences, Interdisciplinary

Expertise

• Energy Modelling
• Sustainable Energy Financing
• Energy Policy and Regulation

Summary

National decarbonisation roadmaps are intended to provide high-level strategies for the long-term transformation of energy systems. In order to achieve this objective, they prioritise simplicity, consistency and comparability across regions. In practice, this typically involves the use of aggregate indicators, national averages, and large-scale supply-side measures such as the deployment of utility-scale renewable energy, the expansion of transmission infrastructure, and fuel switching in major sectors. While this abstraction is necessary for national policy alignment and macroeconomic coordination, it significantly limits the ability of these roadmaps to represent the urban contexts in which decarbonisation must ultimately be implemented. As a result, the spatial, infrastructural, and behavioural dimensions that dominate energy use in cities are often poorly reflected.

Municipal actions are frequently underrepresented because cities operate at much finer spatial, temporal, and institutional scales. Urban energy systems are shaped by heterogeneous building stocks, settlement density, land-use and mobility configurations, socioeconomic conditions, microclimates, and historically evolved infrastructure networks. These characteristics vary substantially not only between cities, but also within cities themselves. National energy system models generally lack the spatial resolution, sectoral integration, and detailed datasets required to represent such heterogeneity. Incorporating these features would substantially increase model complexity and data requirements, which is typically avoided in national-level analyses.

Furthermore, a significant proportion of urban interventions lie outside the direct scope of national energy policy. Municipalities exert influence over energy outcomes through building regulations and renovation strategies, spatial and mobility planning, parking and access policies, public procurement, district heating and cooling development, waste and wastewater management, and the operation of local assets such as public buildings, transport fleets, or treatment plants. These interventions are inherently place-based, evolve dynamically over time, and frequently interact across sectors such as energy, transport, land use, and air quality. Their systemic interactions and feedback effects are difficult to represent in conventional national modelling frameworks that focus primarily on energy supply technologies.

Consequently, when national strategies are translated to municipal levels, critical local characteristics and decision-making levers are frequently lost. Cities are therefore left with limited analytical support to evaluate the concrete actions that fall within their legal authority and planning autonomy. These include assessing how building codes and renovation programmes shape long-term heating and cooling demand; identifying viable density thresholds for district heating, cogeneration, or public transport systems; evaluating the impacts of electrified mobility and modal shifts on distribution grids; and determining how municipal assets such as public buildings, wastewater treatment facilities, or waste heat sources can contribute to local energy supply. In addition, cities often lack tools to assess how these locally administered interventions interact with climate change impacts, such as rising cooling demand or urban heat island effects, as well as with air quality objectives, social equity concerns, and higher-level regional and national decarbonisation pathways.

This disconnection highlights a structural mismatch between national ambitions and local implementation capacity. Although cities are responsible for a significant proportion of energy consumption, transport activity and emissions (critical issues in the battle against air pollution, congestion and energy poverty) they often lack the modelling tools required to capture urban-scale complexity and systemic interactions. Effective municipal and regional planning requires transparent energy system models capable of integrating high-resolution spatial data, sector coupling, behavioural drivers and infrastructure constraints. However, urban-scale energy system models are still in their infancy and difficult to access due to fragmented data availability, limited institutional capacity, and the lack of scalable, open-source modelling platforms.

This research addresses these gaps by investigating how national and regional energy transition roadmaps can be translated into realistic, actionable, and context-sensitive strategies at the urban level. It develops a transparent and scalable urban Energy System Model that integrates high-resolution geospatial data on buildings, infrastructure networks, population, climate, mobility, and local energy resources. The model is designed to assess not only renewable energy potentials, but also demand-side efficiency, transport-energy interactions, grid constraints, flexibility options, and policy interventions under different climate, electrification, and urban development scenarios. By explicitly linking municipal decision-making processes to regional and national pathways, the research provides a data-driven framework to support cities in designing resilient, equitable and sustainable energy transition strategies based on real urban conditions. This framework helps cities to avoid long-term lock-in and align their strategies with overarching decarbonisation objectives.

Supervision by

• Promotor: Prof. dr. K.S. (Klaus) Hubacek | Integrated Research on Energy, Environment and Society - IREES | ESRIG, University of Groningen.
• Co-promotor: Prof. E. (Evrim) Ursavas| Operations — Management | Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen.

More information and contact details can be found on the personal profile of Alejandro Zabala Figueroa.