A competitive evaluation of urban energy systems from viewpoints of energy conservation and mitigating environmental impact

Although various energy system alternatives for business, commercial, and residential customers have recently been developed in order to reduce energy consumption and CO₂ emission, it is important to evaluate competitive characteristics among such new energy system alternatives quantitatively, in consideration of tradeoff relations among economic cost, energy consumption, and CO₂ emission. In this paper, using multiobjective optimization model for urban energy system planning, two competitive evaluations are performed. One is the break‐even cost analysis for introducing more efficient, but more expensive energy equipment, such as photovoltaic system and fuel cell system. The other is that we evaluate the competitiveness of a certain energy system from the viewpoint of a whole urban area because there are multiple alternatives for attaining the same target of reducing CO₂ emission of energy consumption. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electr Eng Jpn, 164(2): 71–79, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/eej.20421