Making cities more energy efficient

World Bank Project: Trace – Tool for Rapid Assessment of City Energy

Consideration of the efficiency of energy use at the city-scale can present budget constrained cities with a significant opportunity to respond to their energy needs without sacrificing their development priorities.

The World Bank’s Energy Sector Management and Assistance Programme recognised that for city authorities to successfully identify appropriate and feasible energy efficiency interventions, they need new and practical tools that inform the underpinning decision-making processes.

Looking to catalyse more rapid understanding of city-scale energy use issues and appropriate responses, the World Bank commissioned Buro Happold to develop a Tool for Rapid Assessment of City Energy (TRACE).

Since its development, TRACE has been deployed in cities across East Asia, Georgia, Turkey, Macedonia and Sub-Saharan Africa

TRACE’s benchmarking module has a database of 28 energy efficiency KPIs collected from 64 cities

TRACE contains a playbook of 59 energy efficiency interventions supported by a database of 191 case studies that link to appropriate resources and tools

Challenge

Planning for energy efficiency can potentially reduce a city’s overall energy use levels, reduce city energy expenditures and reduce its dependence on imported fuels. Effective interventions will often yield wider co-benefits such as higher local job creation, enhanced competitiveness and improved public health. Furthermore, efficiency improvements can free up city authority resources allowing them to be redirected to improve city services elsewhere.

Despite the potential gains, however, energy efficiency planning at the city-scale has remained a complex exercise complicated by a myriad of challenges. Decision support tools that facilitate rapid assessment of the energy performance of a city’s key services, identify sectors with the highest improvement potential, and provide relevant guidance on how to initiate and manage appropriate measures can add significant value to the planning process. Buro Happold was tasked with developing such a tool that was also simple, low cost, user friendly, and sufficiently flexible to allow for deployment into a wide range of contexts.

Solution

TRACE is a pioneering process for rapid city energy efficiency planning. It is a computer based tool with three components that guide the user through a series of sequential steps. It begins with an initial data gathering exercise that benchmarks the city’s energy efficiency performance relative to peer cities. The process continues with the use of structured information to identify sectors for prioritised action, and concludes by identifying appropriate energy efficiency interventions. The TRACE process considers energy efficiency issues across six primary city service areas: passenger transport, municipal buildings, water and waste water, public lighting, solid waste, and power and heat.

As part of the framework development process, Buro Happold tested TRACE in three cities in East Asia. City decision makers and sector experts from each of these three cities were closely involved throughout the deployment process, and the experiences and insights from these city authorities were used to improve the tool’s scope and structure.

Value

Buro Happold carefully balanced the need for development of a tool structured around formal processes for reliability and consistency with the need for flexibility and an ability to suit a wide range of city contexts. TRACE achieves this by firmly guiding users whilst retaining flexibility to refine inputs and outputs where there is a clear rationale for doing so. Since its development by Buro Happold, the TRACE tool and process have been deployed in cities across East Asia, Georgia, Turkey, Macedonia and Sub-Saharan Africa.