Strategic analysis adaptation assessment: An alternative to the storyline scenario

Scenarios of future trends are widely used by government and international agencies to inform decision-making. While story line scenarios may be useful for business or government thinking, they are not effective at informing engineering research, innovation and design, and add very little to the understanding of sustainability. This paper presents a strategic analysis approach to complex systems, which relies on identification of risks to important activities and wellbeing. This method mimics the actual processes of anthropogenic continuity, where people explore, experiment, learn from success and mistakes, and adapt and evolve. The method is applied to the case study of transportation fuel supply in New Zealand. Directions for immediate strategic engineering research and innovation are clear outcomes of the analysis

Pattern Recognition Residential Demand Response: An Option for Critical Peak Demand Reduction in New Zealand

Influencing households to adopt sustainable energy consumption behaviour is important to the transition towards a sustainable energy future. However, if one aims at influencing the energy consumption habits of people, one should also be able to estimate the resulting effects on the entire energy system. Residential demand response to reduce load on the electricity network has largely been impeded by information barriers and a lack of proper understanding of consumers’ behaviour. What are not well understood and are of great interest include load disaggregation, the behaviour of customers when responding to demand response request, load shifting models and their impact on the load curve of the utility. There is concern among demand response practitioners, for example, that demand response in the residential sector may simply move the peak problem with scale from one point in time to another. However, unavailability of appliance-level demand data makes it difficult to study this problem. In this paper, a generalized statistical model for generating load curves of the individual residential appliances is presented. These data allow one to identify the relative contribution of the different components of the residential load on a given residential feeder. This model has been combined with demand response survey in a neighbourhood with 400 households in Christchurch, New Zealand, to determine the effect of customers’ behaviour in reducing the neighbourhood’s winter peak demand. The results show that when customers’ are given enhanced information, they would voluntarily act to reduce their peak demand by about 10% during the morning peak hours and 11% during the evening peak hours. The demand responsiveness of the individual appliances is also presented. The effectiveness of customer behaviour modification in maintaining system reliability is also presented

Power moves : Houston, Texas and the politics of mobility, 1950-1985

This dissertation argues that between 1950 and 1985 a diverse collection of residents from the Houston, Texas metropolitan area used debates about the planning, construction, and meaning of transportation structures—primarily highways and mass transit systems—as opportunities to claim political power and to influence the future of their neighborhoods and city. As they contested these systems, Houstonians articulated competing notions of the politics of mobility. In addition to concrete political decisions about transportation, this term also encompasses the daily transportation decisions of Houstonians and the meanings those residents ascribed to the infrastructure that carried them across the city. The politics of mobility uniquely illuminates the intersection of politics, culture, and urban development in Houston. Who wielded the power to make choices about Houston’s transportation networks and how the balance of that power changed over time are central questions of this dissertation. Until the late 1950s and early 1960s, a collection of nearly all white and male elected officials, professional planners, and private developers held immense power over the city’s decision-making process, but never completely controlled it. The actions of citizens outside that group forced leaders to acknowledge, if rarely embrace, the perspectives that citizens held about transportation and the politics of mobility. By the mid-1970s, aided by changes in federal oversight and citizen participation regulations, as well as by their own assertions of political power, an increasingly diverse set of Houstonians—African American, ethnic Mexican, and white, urban and suburban, rich and poor—possessed more influence over the city’s transportation choices. By engaging in these debates, Houstonians challenged the city’s racial, economic, and decision-making status quo. The choices made in Houston’s struggle over the placement of highways and the creation of a public transit authority sheds light onto the foundations of Houston’s unique built environment and offers a model for understanding similar forces at work in other auto-centric southern and western, “Sunbelt” cities, such as Los Angeles and Atlanta. Further, these conflicts illuminate why older cities in the Northeast and Midwest and younger ones in the West and the South developed such divergent urbanization patterns and transportation practices.Histor

Commuting distance and transport energy resilience: quantifying human commuting distribution to explore low carbon potentials with transition projects

Human commuting activity plays a significant role in understanding urban transport systems. This paper proposes a novel approach to modelling commuting distance distribution in a concise way. Having studied a small number of training data in New Zealand, it is found that the human commuting distance distribution can be quantified as a simple CDF exponential function with only one parameter to be determined, and the parameter is mainly dependent on the average distance to employment catchment. Besides its good predictability for test data, a Monte Carlo method to calculate the commuting VKT was introduced in the course of validation with considerable approximation to the real VKT observation. Two case studies on how to apply this model are presented to manifest its strength in exploring low carbon potentials in urban transport system, assuming that commuters could cycle to their workplaces in short distance, and an efficient commuting bus line was developed to replace the car driving in long distance. This model is convenient in simulating and predicting commuting distance distribution with limited data availability, and provides a quantitative foundation for analyzing urban transport resilience and emission mitigation

Commissioning, initial testing and results from an experimental one kilowatt organic Rankine cycle

Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) systems are capable of utilising low-enthalpy heat sources to generate power. The aim of the Above Ground Geothermal and Allied Technologies (AGGAT) research programme is to develop ORC systems within New Zealand. For the design, component selection and operation of ORC systems, it is important to understand process parameters and component behaviour. An experimental scale ORC system, known as ORC-B, has been built and tested at the University of Canterbury to assist in furthering our knowledge of ORC system design and construction. This paper presents experimental results from running a 1 kW ORC-B system using HFC-M1 refrigerant, a zeotropic mixture of R245fa and R365mfc as the working fluid under several operating conditions. Hot exhaust combustion products from a 30kW CapstoneTM Gas Turbine are used as the heat source and heat is transferred via a thermal oil loop to the working fluid through a plate heat exchanger. A scroll expander magnetically coupled to an AC generator is used for work extraction and energy conversion. A thermodynamic analysis of the component performance is undertaken, factoring in several practical aspects of the system and its design. Details on the applied aspects of obtaining accurate results from an experimental ORC system are included, such as the effect of restriction to the flow path, heat losses, pump motor slippage and measurement uncertainty

The sustainability ballast framework for design of remote electrification

The UN sustainable development goal No 7 aims to achieve affordable and clean energy for all, but this is not yet achieved for approximately one billion people in remote communities. Small scale systems can provide benefits, but existing approaches are primarily top-down ap-proaches that are developed by experts, and focus on the electrical engineering, economics, and policy aspects. These are not always successful, because the sociological aspects are overlooked. A new approach to addressing remote energy development is required that better addresses the societal component. The objective was to develop a conceptual framework whereby the sociologi-cal values of indigenous communities were better included in electrification decision-making.A grounded theory approach was used to interview members of a rural indigenous community and identify key features of their world view. Several categories of values were identified, referred to as ’ballasts’. The idea of balance between these was a strong theme that emerged from the community discussion. A composite index was then constructed. Case study results are presented for a remote rural Amazonian community, Kabakaburi in Guyana. Nine sustainability ballasts were identified as part of the indigenous community’s world view: biological capacity, social capacity, autonomy, equity & equality, electric utility, health, education, communication, and products and services. This paper develops a new framework to include the values and world-view aspects of indigenous communities in electrification decision-making

Application of the InTIME Methodology for the Transition of Office Buildings to Low Carbon—A Case Study

The COP21 Paris Agreement requires urgent abatement of 80% of the current fossil-based energy consumption to keep global warming below dangerous levels. Heating loads in commercial buildings can be reduced by retrofitting the building envelope, upgrading the efficiency of heating equipment, implementing energy management strategies, substituting renewable energy sources, and influencing energy-saving behavior. However, achieving the downshift of gas or coal heat is a wicked problem. The Interdisciplinary Transition Innovation Management and Engineering (InTIME) methodology was applied to address the wicked problem of district heating of campus buildings of the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand. The carbon downshift scenario requires a reduction in coal purchase by 80% from the first year through the engineering of adaptive measures for facility operators and occupants. Accordingly, a successful downshift of fossil-fuel energy would depend on the effective adaptation of the office workers. Adaptation plans to facilitate demand participation and sustained worker productivity could be designed once the actual heating behaviour is known. The contribution of this work is a novel fossil fuel abatement concept: the Targeted Heating Energy—Assessment and Intervention Design (THE-AID), which focuses on the assessment of the heating behavioural patterns of office workers. Building services engineers can use the THE-AID concept to develop adaptation plans through intervention design and resource facilitation focused on building occupants. THE-AID projects could achieve significant emissions reduction in the near term at a low cost and increase resilience to heat supply disruptions

Phase Field Model of Faceted Anatase TiO2 Dendrites in Low Pressure Chemical Vapor Deposition

Anatase TiO2 nanorods with a well-defined h110i texture have been studied using a model-based characterization technique based on a previous modeling framework. Intricate secondary side facets characteristic of tilt angles of 26.5◦ have been indexed and a h112i growth direction of the well-aligned facets is identified. These results have not been accessed experimentally but crucial in understanding the nature of the most abundant facets and their structural properties. We find agreement between our results and indirect experimental measurements. Highly exposed {116} facets are found to be responsible for the excellent electrochemical surface properties in the nanostructured anatase TiO2 thin films

New Zealand transition engineering retro-analysis

To meet New Zealand’s emission commitments, the government has prioritized the up-take of Electric Vehicles (EVs), as personal transportation is a large consumer of fossil fuels. Extrapolating figures from official sources (Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment) we estimate that passenger transportation is responsible for at least 30% of New Zealand’s fossil fuel consumption. Given New Zealand has a large share of renewable sources (78%) the simple conclusion is that the uptake of EVs would directly reduce carbon emissions, however the interaction of EVs with the power system is complex and requires a comprehensive approach. Transition Engineering (TE) is an emerging field that addresses sustainability in design and management of engineered systems. Within the context of the TE methodology we investigated the implication of EV targets on the New Zealand Energy System and associated Greenhouse Gas Emissions. We utilized a Retro Analysis approach, using the transport activity and grid composition of 2012, superimposing various policy objectives into that system to understand the costs, benefits, consequences and utility of the policy. An energy system model was developed using the Longrange Energy Alternatives Planning System (LEAP). The model incorporated seasonal availability of power plants along with sector specific energy consumption profiles reported in official datasets. We defined a set of scenarios to examine the impact of different EV targets, charging behavior, modal shift, transport behavior and changes to grid composition. The implications of the intermittent nature of renewable resources were explored along with potential demand additions (EV charging) on the power system