- Improving the Resilience of a City to the Peak Oil through Solar Energy. An Estimation Method Applied to Bressanone City    482 kb by    Vettorato, Daniele | daniele.vettorato@eurac.edu    Short Outline The paper describes a method to estimate the solar power contribution to the resilience of a city to the peak oil. The method is based on GIS, remote sensing and spreadsheets. The results are discussed in the framework of the current international debate on the integration of renewable energy in cities. Abstract It is a common idea that the reduction of the dependence from outside systems energy sources is of crucial importance to improve the city’s resilience to peak oil. Limited resources, geopolitical issues, security and transportation costs related to fuel provisioning (mainly oil and nuclear) heavily affect local economies and welfare. In this context the spatial matching between local energy demand and local renewable energy supply potentials is of crucial importance in the design of resilient cities. It is an internationally shared idea that the solar energy harvesting, in particular, can produce heat and electricity reducing the share of energy imported by a city from outside systems. This strategy is widely promoted also in the framework of reducing the carbon emissions. In particular the use of solar collectors installed on building’s roofs, according to these policies, can contribute to the local energy production preserving the landuse. Despite the importance and the wide agreement on this technology, very few quantitative estimations have been carried out to understand: - How much energy can be obtained by the solar roofs of the whole city using the existing technologies; - How much local energy demand can be covered by local solar power production. The research described in this paper proposes a replicable method to estimate, in a quantitative way, the quota of local energy demand (heat and electricity) that can be covered by local solar energy production (from solar collectors on the roofs). The paper addresses the topic, describes the research and the scientific method used to estimate both the local energy demand and the solar energy local potential, describes the application on the case study and finally discusses the results. The method, that is replicable, has been tested on the city of Bressanone located northern Italy between the Alps. It uses a quantitative approach based on GIS, remote sensing and spreadsheets. The results are discussed in the framework of the current international debate on the integration of renewable energy in cities (GEA KM18 Urbanization, 2012). Keywords Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2012: Fast Forward: Planning in a (hyper) dynamic urban context   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper