A Conceptual Framework for the Integrated Studies of Energy Transformation in Smart Cities

The benefits of smart city are enormous. But the list of challenges in their planning, development, and operation is long and difficult to overcome. Two important questions to policymakers and stakeholders: (1) What are the new energy problems in smart city? and (2) What are the appropriate interventions (e.g., technologies, policies) to address these problems so that best energy services can be provided? To address these questions, information from many relevant disciplines—science, engineering, policy analysis, and management—needs to be gleaned, analyzed and synthesized to generate scientifically-sound and policy-relevant knowledge. Guided by insights from literature on integrated assessment, a holistic approach for technology-and-policy analysis, this paper presents a structural framework for integrated studies of energy transformation for better sustainability and resilience in the context of smart cities. This paper first identifies a list of guiding questions. It is followed by defining the city boundary, and reducing urban energy system into six basic elements: energy resources, hardware, processes (organized signal process, and energy process), people (individuals, and organizations), institutions, and activities. Three major challenges in developing an operational model based on this framework—model integration and complexity, data availability and uncertainty, and decision salience and policy relevance—are also discussed.