The EU City Calculator

 

 

What do we plan to achieve?

The EU City Calculator aims to deliver an energy modelling tool adapted to the city needs and representative of the major material, energy and emission-related processes happening within the city’s administrative areas and beyond. The tool plans to integrate specific mitigation actions formulated at the city level into its modelling framework and provide cities with an easy-to-use web-interface for model exploration.

What is the tool?

The EU City Calculator is a webtool designed to help cities in their decision-making and implementation of their climate strategy, by allowing them to visualize and simulate low-carbon scenarios. It provides an easy-to-use interface enabling city administrations and other stakeholders to assess the implications and trade-offs related to the implementation of mitigation measures. For example, how much GHG emissions can be saved in the building sector via improvements in energy retrofitting versus renewable energy expansion?

What can it do?

The webtool is designed to facilitate consultation with a broad (technical and non-technical) audience. With a user-friendly look and an open-source model, implementing all energy-relevant sectors under the same framework, everything is built to help experts and non-expert adopt/use the tool.

Since the webtool is a simulation model, it allows to investigate the full option space for climate mitigation. This is relevant as it allows the integration of transformative change associated with innovation and changes in human behaviour. Considering the challenges we have been facing in the last years, it seems more and more important to be able to handle those disruptions to stay aligned with reality.

The webtool has a robust model behind, therefore it allows to account for the evolution of energy and emission drivers at different levels of governance, as well as considering the link between the actions that may be leveraged by the cities. This correlation between the actions is a key point of the model which is not present in classical monitoring webtool currently available.