Session 1.1: Urban Energy Planning for Smarter Utilities

May 22nd, 2019

Cities require reliable energy for efficient water supply, wastewater treatment, solid waste management, housing, logistics, and other essential functions. Presenters in this session shared forward-thinking views, industry insights and concrete examples of how utilities can promote the integration of renewable energy and energy efficiency into urban planning. The discussions centered around efforts by utilities and cities to address the emerging challenges with conventional and transformative technologies in the various urban forms.

Moderator: Virinder Sharma, Senior Urban Development Specialist, ADB

Scene Setter Talk: Stephane Bessadi, Senior Water Utility Specialist, SDCC, ADB

Presenters:

Designing Water/Used Water Transfer and Treatment Schemes to Reduce and Generate Energy
Adrian Marsden, Associate Director, Arup

While water/used water utilities are significant power users, they have the opportunity to generate their own power and design facilities that are more efficient. This presentation highlighted several examples from projects around the world, including the Philippines and UK, where renewable technologies have been made integral elements of capital investment programmes. It also focused on key constraints, typically from regulatory frameworks, that challenge the implementation of such approaches, and recommend best practices.

Future-Proof Strategy for Electric Cooperatives to Integrate More Renewables into their Supply Portfolio
Ville Rimali, Business Development Manager, Philippines, Wärtsilä Corporation

Most cooperatives and private electricity distribution utilities have burdened themselves with too many contracts for traditional, inflexible coal baseload capacity, on top of which they have expensive peaking contracts based on diesel. That leaves little room to contract cheaper and cleaner renewable energy source into their generation portfolio, before existing long-term Power Supply Agreements (PSA) expire. This presentation explored how cooperatives can adopt a strategy of substituting their expiring PSAs with new and cleaner technologies such as solar and wind while using flexible technologies such as engines and energy storage to integrate and manage the load.

Renewable Energy Implementation Toolkit Development and Demonstration in South Asia: Sri Lanka
Qingchan YU, Program Manager of Climate Change, Global Environmental Institute

The Global Environmental Institute has developed a Renewable Energy Implementation (REI) toolkit that helps to evaluate, implements, and scale up renewable energy projects at national and regional levels. The toolkit includes GIS analysis, technology application MCA screening and financial analysis, and has been used to design industrial rooftop solar PV installation projects in China’s Guangdong Province. This presentation provided an overview of the toolkit, which can be used by developing countries in Asia to achieve their climate change commitments.

Tapping the Power of Predictive Analytics to Optimise the Use of Green Energy and Reducing Cost of Energy for Smarter Utilities
Arun Kumar, Chief Executive Officer, Kreate Energy

India needs modern, predictive analytic tools to effectively meet its renewable energy target of 175 GW, and address the challenges of grid balancing, accommodating intermittent renewable generation, and real time transmission line congestion management. This presentation showcased a solution using demand and renewable generation forecasting as the main tool to address increased renewables integration into the grid. In addition, a case study was presented for two renewable rich states (with a RE capacity share of 25%-30% of the total capacity).