ID: 1581
Presenting Author: Yuan Xu
Session: 572 - Fit For Future and Act at Present: Impact Assessment for Leveraging Challenges and Opportunities from Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation
Status: pending
Energy transition in megacities is crucial for global carbon neutrality. This study assesses the impacts of spatial constraints on the availability and affordability of urban solar electricity.
Megacities are at the forefront of pursuing global carbon neutrality. Due to the long lifetime of CO2, their energy transition pace at present will significantly shape future climate change. This study develops a geospatial–techno-economic framework to assess DSPV (Distributed Solar Photovoltaics) availability and affordability across Shenzhen’s scattered, irregular, and diverse (SID) spaces, focusing on rooftops, building façades, and road noise barriers. Leveraging building vectors with height attributes, a shadow analysis model and solar ray-tracing algorithms were employed to quantify the effects of mutual shading and surface inclination that significantly compromise the capacity factors of PV. High-resolution irradiation data, meteorological parameters, and an irradiation model were utilized. The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is analyzed based on installation costs, operational expenses, and other market-driven parameters. The results reveal that rooftops, building facades, and RNBs’ PV electricity generation potentials are 21,165 GWh/year, 85,131 GWh/year, and 13.3 GWh/year, respectively, almost equivalent to 94% of Shenzhen’s annual electricity demand in 2023. Affordability is a much bigger concern with their LCOE ranges being 0.020–0.421 USD/kWh, 0.058–0.261 USD/kWh, and 0.090–1.404 USD/kWh under different scenarios, respectively. These findings illustrate that spatial constraints in dense cities not only affect the availability of solar electricity but also, more importantly, its affordability.
Yuan Xu is an associate professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, studying energy transition, carbon neutrality & climate policy with impact assessment and techno-economic analysis.
Coauthor 1: Kai Zhang