Powering the City: The role of Building Integrated Photovoltaics

Followed by a one hour discussion session which will be modulated by sri, the Director here, Associate Director.

And after that we have a exhibition outside where some of the tools that.

We'Ve been building over the past few.

Years are exhibited by our researchers. So also there you can engage with the researchers and explore a bit what we're doing and how that can benefit solar planning in Singapore.

To not keep much longer, we have five presentations now. Each of the talks will be approximately 10 minutes. If there are any burning questions from the audience, you may ask.

First.

Ideally we keep the discount for later.

For the second part. So if the question can wait later.

Other than that I will remind the presenters if 10 minutes are over, I will hold up.

Some time and then you can wrap it up ideally. So that's a little indication. Disclaimer the talk is being recorded Talk stream online so what we are doing now is discussion.

We will turn off the zoom and.

On the recording and.

So with that.

I would like to introduce Professor Arnold Schwyter. He is the professor of Architecture Building.

And he is principal investigator of the Boring City module as well as program director at future cities like Oregons. In his research he specializes in low emission integrated energy systems in Belgian cities and using computational as well as experimental methods. Professor Schluter has received prestigious awards in the past including the 2022 Market Award, the 2023 Mars Drawer Excellence in Energy Innovation and recently I think last week the Red Dots Design Awards, the adaptation.

Of the MPV project and its talk.

He will be presenting key results of our module and talk on integrating renewable energy at that. Welcome Arno Kyota thank you so much Kyla for the nice words.

Welcome everyone. It's a pleasure for me to welcome.

Everyone'S flying.

Symposium during the city.

The.

Research we've conducted and I have the pleasure to kick this off with a short glimpse on the Q results.

Focusing on the work of work package one and then we have specialized contributions.

The other work packages and I will.

Second.

We want to see who's all behind us.

So as you know, FCL is a research project that works on two hubs, Singapore and Zurich.

Skilled people from students to PhDs to postdocs to of course my fellow professors who are also here with us today. And the work that will be presented today is done within this group over the duration of almost four years now.

And I think we all of you are on the same page that of course we have to tackle a few problems concerning cities. One of them is of course Roman greenhouse garden missions and we know that Buildings and cities are one of the largest contributors. This is a very interesting study published two years ago that shows the contribution of buildings to greenhouse gas emissions in cities across 160 cities. And you can see this is just a snippet that of course, if you.

Look at the three different countries here.

That of course, buildings are among the large meters in cities. This is no news to you because most of you will be also working in this space. And you could say, well, if you would just be able to reduce the largest emissions of contributing cities, we actually have quite an interesting leverage. And of course, you know, the only ones realize this. We can also see that on a policy level, cities move towards decarbonization. And we see that a lot of cities moving towards renewable energy generation is one way of offsetting carbon emissions by producing energy. We see that this can be in different ways. Decarbonizing through renewable power is one of them. And when we started this conceptualizing five years ago, we thought, this is an interesting idea. We want to know what this does when we scale this up to scale and what are the implications of this.

Very quickly introduce this very clumsy term bipv, because the last four years we've discussed a lot about this. What, what is this actually? What is bipv? What's the difference to rooftop solar?

We're doing.

Everyone's doing solar. What are you guys doing? And I use the definition of the International Energy Agency to kind of frame what VIP is. For us, there's different definitions, but we use this one and say a PIP is a PV module and a construction product. So it's not just energy generation, it's also part of the building. This could be a facade, this could be a roof. That could be something that also has a constructive function in the building.

Or if you put this reverse, you say, if you would, it's mounted, you.

Would need to replace it by a different product.

So think of a facade.

It would take away the facade batting. You need to replace it with some other type of building. And this is important to understand. We're not only talking about solar modules, we're talking about an integral part of the building. Like examples, for example, here, this is a case study in Zurich which shows the entire building envelope is basically generating by using modules that serve for energy generation, but also as a protection, as a part of the building envelope that effects from rain, from sun, from thermal influences. So that's very important as a concept to understand this. What we talk about today is very much this level, the integration of renewable energy generation as Part of a building product.

Why is this important?

Because it also offers new opportunities on how this works economically. If you see this is a study on Europe which the researchers compared what the cost of a kilowatt hour of generated photovoltaics generated electricity would be as compared to the kilowatt hour I buy from the electricity grid. You can see here that if you look at the income breakdown, it makes a much difference if I also factor in the fact that I'm also adding a protective layer to the building. As you can see here, this is the green part. So this actually accounts for my income because I don't have to spend this for other parts of the building envelope. And then if you take this, it's a hypothesis.

This is a hypothesis.

But if you take this, you can see that across the European countries, a kilowatt hour generated with these type of systems actually is less costly than if you take it from the electricity grid, which makes it an economic case. You could say.

It'S economic worth installing these type of systems over the lifetime as compared to taking this electricity from the great Eric. And of course I'm very much aware that this is a European perspective, but it shows that there is a learning curve. It shows that there's a trajectory of making this economic. And of course that's an important time job for our research.

I'm kicking it off with World Package 1 on the topic of energy and design. So relates carbon fawn to energy generation. Package two is with my colleagues from ntu, Frank Slee and Michael Schleppfer on mobility and solar. This collection Alexander Holbeck concludes on the question of life cycle the environmental impact and Yunnan Fu and Tien Fu Singh from annuals on the socioeconomics. So as you can see, we're not purely a technical research. We try to combine different lenses on this problem.

And then I think that is part.

Of the DNA of the shooter City Lab that we try to look at things from different perspectives. When our question formulated how to for example realistically compute the yield in an urban setting.

The difference between.

The plain and urban situation, for example urban situation is much more complex. Shading in terms of heat built up.

In terms of different implementing targets.

So how can we.

How does it implement the life cycle?

Where should we have the buildings should.

Utilize the energy that we generate in the city the best way. How do we balance operational versus embodied? And then of course, what type of tools do we need to design this.

Better in a neural context?

These were part of the research.

We have those two situations.

We Occur in Singapore, of course, a.

Big advantage for us because it's kind of typical of two very typical settings on the snow on the end, we have a high dense tropical city such as Singapore, with very specific constraints, but all with high ambitions on reducing farm emissions. And we have Zurich in a similar way. It's kind of a moderately dense, in a moderate climate situated city that also has a lot of ambitions how to reduce carbon emissions. So in a sense they are aligned. But on the other hand, the boundary conditions are very different. And especially the one that is important for us is how the sun actually moves in different geographic locations. So it causes very different change.

Results. And then after the discussion, we have more time to discuss that. And also we have a range of toolsets that show a lot of those results in a very interactive way.

One question of course is, and we did this in the Zurich case, is how should it be employed? Best you could say I'm taking an ecological optimal way or I'm taking a cost optimal way of doing that. And in our research we looked at this for the city of Zurich on Altstatten, which is a part of Zurich specifically. Then it was basically computed if you would place solar installations across the building envelope, as you can see here. And we know at different points of building envelope, buildings receive different amounts of solar radiation analysis what the cost and the economic life cycle. And then you can say if I'm going for a carbon optimum, then I have a different deployment pathway, as if I would go for a cost optimum. You can see here, this is on the carbon optimal, where we see if we try to ramp ups get installed rather quickly. But we see a lot of insulation, for example on tau facade as well.

As east west facade facade is not so efficient.

And what is interesting to see is that for the carbon optimism, we now just random rather quickly because we are essentially battling against the grid, right? The grid gets decarbonized, the fat. So we can deployed photovoltaics on an environmental perspective. But also what we see from the cost effective, we see that there is a slower ramp up because there's a learning curve that just gets priced into it. But then at the end we actually achieve the same level of even more of photovoltaic installation if you look across the different timelines. So it shows that from an environment as well as from a perspective, deployment makes sense in the context of Zurich. Now this has to be computed at any context in a similar way. Here we can say this from all perspectives. There is a trajectory by a lot of buildings in Zurich with photovoltaic installations. And they can be optimal in those two categories.

Now the question is what the single.

Way this makes sense. And we were intrigued by HDB as a form of settlement, that of course.

We multiply it and you know, and.

Of course really interesting question was how does it relate if we generate electricity on the rooftop versus starting with a vertical city. And HDB is of course very vertical. And we looked at the different areas, settlement areas in Singapore and compared the amount of solar radiation, amount of solar to be produced, the rooftop versus on the facade. And we can see that certain topologies of course more advantageous. So and you can see that in.

Some planning areas, you can actually produce.

More electricity on the facade as compared to and they can have significant contribution overall energy production. What's also interesting is if we see we use the facade in an HDB setting, we could actually produce a large fraction of the energy required in the.

HDB plugins by solar.

Of course, as we can see from this curve, there's a temporal mismatch. So it would require some kind of storage, some kind of management of the solar electricity generated, but basically shows that even particles setting such a single core, there can be significant contribution and it can help decarbonize steam engine in an hc.

So if you think of this facade down here, what would happen if you would actually start to retrofit an hdb? And this is a thought exercise, as you can see here, this is a line exercise. And here we teamed up with two industry partners via Solar and 3A, which are manufacturer as well as a solar manufacturer.

And the idea here was to come.

Up with a lightweight photovoltaic module. That could be the task very easily with H context, as you can see here in this visualization.

So why not come with a simple.

Way of producing solar electricity? And of course, we know of all the concerns, right? There's questions of safety, there's questions of mounting and availability a little bit brought a little bit further to an actual prototype. Then we came up with a system because our industry partner creates a piece of metal, which is a sandwich metal, which is used in a lot of facade plannings. So the idea was, why not use this facade planning and construct it and fold it into a solar module as an example, as an exercise. And you can see here how this final prototype is actually assembled. And down in Zurich, then we use this for different measurements. So of course we want to know how much this. But we also want to understand would it contribute to the heat buildup in a city or Whatnot.

And to the right you can see.

Preliminary images where we see that from preliminary state we're in that.

The element that has the solar module actually heats up less than if we would just take the normal aluminum module, which indicates that there's an amount of absorption of energy we convert into solar electricity.

And the next step they collected.

Of course, what would be the main impact factors on the life cycle of a solar module? And especially in workplace we looked into this kind of taking apart the different elements of such a solar module. As you can see here, it's actually a pretty simple piece of technology, but.

It has those different components.

And now there was a lot of work spent on trying to find the life cycle of those different components and then assemble those sort of photovoltaic modules as VIP modules in a certain way should be different options. For example, how to assemble the frame, what to put in the front cover, which type of solar cell. And this is basically located in, as you can see, at different geographical points where this component comes from. What is an interesting to learn about the life cycle is how this would build up. As you see down here, two thirds of the carbon footprint of a solar module is basically the manufacturing of the solar cell itself. Then afterwards there's things like mounting and electronics behind.

And it gives us a perspective which.

Type of solar module, from an environmental point of view might be most beneficial.

Comparison for a European module created. And you can see here that the different solar cell types have very different impact in terms of life cycle emissions. Here, for example, the CDT module, both in absolute as well as in relative values. That gives us pointers which type of technology should be used in EFP solutions in the future.

Then wrapping this up and this will also be presented as one of the tools.

First we do a lot of modeling.

We built different physical physics based models, but we all know the next generation of models might work in a different way and they might be working more data driven methods. So we also explore how this can be analyzed just using image data. And this is one very interesting work that uses available image data to segment areas on which side would actually be all solar PV installations. For VMPV installations, then this is linked to the calculation what the heat of this area would actually be. Then you can show that using this method allows you to have a more precise estimation of the solar yield of Sardis compared to other ways or in simplified ways where you just assume 50% can be used. This can be very different. This is an exciting opportunity to use different techniques that can be much faster in assessing the solar yield for example in practice as compared to a high effort computation. Again, it's also on display as so.

I think in our work we could show that there's significant potential to this contribute to decarbonization in cities not only in Zurich, but also in Singapore. We've seen that of course this is very much dependent on the yield that you can generate. Placement on the building questions of seasonality and of course the grid context. Doing this in a context where the grid itself has high emissions makes it environmentally much more beneficial. See that very common topology dominate only energy demand, but also the generation and utilization capacities for how can I utilize solar energy best, but also how much.

They need on the specific building.

See that the times are where a solar module is just this clunky blue aluminum frame elements you can design and you can integrate into architecture and you can even invent new types of solar lightweight solar for example. So also for the among us.

We.

See in the presentation by now that there's interesting opportunities how to utilize solar electricity better, for example by electric vehicles.

You see them in it.

And of course every time we presented.

It there were very critical questions about the heat buildup. So how much does solar actually contributes to heating up? And of course we're all fighting the heat island effect.

And it's I spoke about from the.

Last time the words.

Because it actually does both right intake over the course of the day. But there is at least in his study there's a decrease of heat through long wave radiation at the time. But you only know the roots of solar. So on facade solar it's again a little bit different. But we can say from the preliminary studies that we see here there's impact, there is an uptake and there's a removable peels. But what we can see is that A likely it will not impact human comfort and B other factors are much more important.

That's the summary of that.

So with this summary at the end of my 10 minutes and I think I took a little longer as we.

Expected.

This is really really fast in a nutshell. And I would like you to reach out to all the researchers that are named up here and I showed images to a point have much more detail. We've brought a lot of publications as this is our main business. So feel free to look into all of those publications and of course make use of the tools and engage your researchers with critical questions.

Thank you very much for your attention.

From the audience. Cannot wait later.

Now there was one quick question from.

The audience higher level question what is.

The difference between the years of VIPV versus pv?

Can you say something for that?

Okay then actually let's my question answer the next presentation.

Here and many of you will know.

Him even the deputy CEO of Diris, the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore and nus and upon researching on your CV I saw that you actually started working with photovoltaics already in 1992 with Ste. Siemens with the Siemens R D lab and you have joined stereotype in 2010 and then you have two spin off.

Companies.

I have G1 PV also and you have the strategic scientific paper that's very well known here the PV Road chat for Singapore. There's also a lot of more research and we are very happy to have you here and to listen to your.

Talk on the NPV of Singapore challenges.

And opportunities and with that welcome to yeah.

Introduction and I'm very happy to be here and always come back here to mcl. I'm Thomas Randle, the CEO of ceres. There is a Singapore's national Institute for Applied Solar Research and we cover the field value chain from solar panels modules systems and building integrated photovoltaics is one of our core topics actually one of our we only have three flagship projects.

On the standard solar cells One is.

Building integrated and the third one is floating people.

Which we also which we obviously include like building added photovoltaics or building attached photovoltaics that's one of our core research topics and there's also one dedicated chapter in our our PV roadmap or update of the PV roadmap which is still which is freely available and that roadmap if you have read that is also a sizable economics portion because techno economics that's absolutely key. We have brilliant new technologies but it cost a bomb. It will not hit the market it doesn't change the world out there and we want to have even move responsibility. Can we really change the way the this case how E is adopted.

Now.

One.

Key.

Was that we analyzed all buildings in single buildings so we had access that's the beauty of there is being a national institute that we had access to the high resolution model which we didn't get insights we literally had to carry servers into the SLA server because of the firewalls. We had to sign this government Government Data act says whoever looked at the data has to be shot there afterwards. Don't even think about doing anything outside of your purpose with it. But we analyzed 130,000 buildings that's the current building stock and growing.

And so this was especially we did this very detailed analysis. If you look at the.

1/3 of all the area is actually into retrofit and new buildings. And then.

For new buildings their economics already work out reasonably well. But obviously the element in the room is existing buildings. That's the and that's the real challenge. Existing buildings cost competitive not just doing it for the sake of eip. That's needed to really make it cost effective really make a major impact.

Now what I want to do in the next few minutes is to demystify the IP because there's a lot of talks about when it works and how it works whether it's nice to do it. So there's three major myths which I observe always discuss discussing relevant people is like.

Audience just now another one is it's T and the third one of course it's ug. This is by.

Architects urban planners. It's almost like a reflex. Doesn't mean go to the brain. It's like the lingian spine with low PPE in it. I don't want to see this. I do and then something which we we can P in the discussion because I also want to involve I don't know special scientist defines what is aesthetic what is ugly. And are we if everyone says it's ugly are we able to potentially change their perception that one day even on the wall and maybe even rain could be considered a state of the art modern and maybe that's probably something later for the discussion.

So impacted on the facade. Well not necessarily go to CBD and cover the first very massive shade buildings since it's ineffective and you do this. But that's what we did then for the PV for every single building on the three by three raster we analyzed the building. You see the radiance on each and every surface. This minimum irradiance threshold surface tilt angle surface area utilization factors really get to the gist of where does it make economic sense.

The question for the audience the online audience a PD panel because I get this question.

Panel whether its face is perfectly the sun based on a vertical circulus it's virtually the same efficiency. The convergence efficiency of light into electricity is almost the same. You have a little bit of higher surface reflection because of the oblique sun angle.

Conversion is almost as efficient as on but the radiance hitting that surface that's definitely less. That's around about 50% when you switch off in Singapore. Depends a little bit on the orientation. South is version west is versus that's what you the energy. But the efficiency is pretty much the same. Builders.

That'S what we did for the PV rodent.

That you see like CBD was a good example. Very blue, very dark, very greenish, not much chances. So you have huge area. But they are not suitable for an economically viable employment of building integrated buildings.

So the second one is.

It's too expensive.

Yeah. So here we have to distinguish between new buildings and retrofit. Now new buildings we have the example of cladding earlier. New building, you have to put something on the water image like you're cladding. And if you use BIPV instead you have only declining. So you have something to count against.

You save money on declining.

With BIPV instead they probably cost you 20, 15, 20% more. But then you generate electricity from that, from that system which like pays down your investment. And that depends a little bit on the.

On what are your input parameters. But at least the generation and the energy, the value of the energy which you generate based on your initial capital expenditure. And that means you have a payback rate. And this is taken from the. But we currently updating this GR because PV module became so dirty cheap last few years. The payback now is definitely below 10 years. You take.

Somebody, you add him in VIP it cost you a little bit more than 20% but then it pays off.

Time for new buildings is less than 10 years. The mixed economics engineering world is designed for 20, 50 years.

Now 30 years.

Many buildings longer than 30 years have a business case. That's it. Hardening to know new buildings. First of all you should do this right away for new buildings. You have to be at a very, very early stage present and filter it and then convince the architect and the designers of the building that this is a good idea that you should be happy with. Many don't know about it, many don't trust the technology. They hear regulations, std, fire codes. So it's not automated process that people who start designing a new building have PV in mind. This is yet again something for the discussion later. How do we get to a state we when we do this states when we design buildings or new neighborhoods have solar architecture that solar is an integrated part on every single surface.

We designed this life cycle.

The national solar repositories of our service website. We also run this repository stop shop for PV in general. One stage EIPV where we have a VIP list cycle cost calculator. If you want to play with the numbers. How does it pan out for your own building.

To design one.

LCC calculator. You get like a tiny building, you can turn it around in all different dimensions. Then for every single location you can add in a number how many square meters you plan to build. With the IPV you can do all different cardinal directions and then you can. You can play with more than 10 parameters so you so you would start with.

With the amount then you can have a discount rate if you do life cycle cost and if you do also LCOE calculation you will notice that financial parameters are as important as technical parameters. So this is for us academics and techies a bit hard to understand the discount rate and your lending rate is equally important as you're taking problems then if you play with the discount rate the area factor which efficiency of your the solar panels we also give typical values and you also give examples if you have different opinions or you want to try something different ranges.

Cost for.

Operation maintenance annual reserve, patient system lifetime. So there's a whole bunch of you get this life cycle cost influence how you inter life cycle what is your. What is the benefit over having a planning for example how much money you save compared to.

Environmental parameters.

It's not ideal anymore. There's so many options now in series. About one and a half years ago as you probably know we unveiled the.

We can now make solid envelopes which look like pyranacle tiles and they are designed in a way that you have hotspots, you know the reliability issues and colored options which we have. We only use 6% of the efficiency 6% relative of the efficiency of a standard black solar panel. And that's. That's really something special and you probably have seen the news we also did for the National Day parade this year made a single flag out of solar panels. So you can a lot of dying possibilities. I also want to put back into your mind the largest VIP system in Singapore at the PSA maintenance phase and the Newport and you will notice which of the dark gray areas is secular panels and which one which are regular cladding. This is something which.

You would see this paper with normal cladding. Anything that's gray here would basically be replaced with solar panels and that's the prime example for that. There are other examples in town. South beach has an integrated system Anjung Pagar center has a semi transparent system intake one which many of you know.

Outpost and area is located has an overarching canopy across the there some other architectural like this umbrella type sort of arena bay. So it's happening so the ugly I don't accept the ugly anymore but there's many more innovations that are happening and.

One of the innovations is also how.

To Integrate it into start. So how the start is one of our spin off sitting here in what to do about that. But we always ask ourselves, and I always push our researchers to say, if you get the chance to start all over again, you do it the same way or will you do it differently? And in one aspect we decided one day we could do it differently. At the moment we have tried to merge the architectural world in the solar world. And the solar world has. They have solar panels which are 1 by 2 meter roughly. And now we try to squeeze any architectural design into one by two meters. And one thing, if you go to building construction architecture, there's Nothing which is 1 by 2 meter basically much larger or thicker or heavier. So being developed now, we are quite far in the process of developing something which we call the pixel concept. To say no, we would start differently, we would not start again with 1 by 2 meter because it simply doesn't fit into any design element in the construction. So we, we think a smaller unit makes more sense. And I don't know whether construction of renovation is a hobby. So if you do mosaic tiles in your bathroom, for example, you don't put every single mosaic tile on the wall. You could die. You could do this in 10 years and your bathroom is still not finished. So you basically have a structure behind which holds many of these mosaic paths. And you put this whole structure at the end looks like individual pixel. In fact, it's much more, it's organized in a way. And then something similar here is that we have pixels and the pixel could be as small as a single solar cell, could be an ensom of cells or so this we have quite flexibility and we have this pixel concept where we can then make facades out of individual pixels the size of a solar cell. And every solar cell could be the same color, the same form factor, but it could also be different. But ideally we have, at one point in time we have an image and we have already taken a software that pixels basically your image and converts it into this pixel tool. And then you also have behind all the electronics so that you slot it in basically.

And you get the entire picture which you wanted to have. That was part of this pixel concept. So this is something that we try to push boundaries a little bit on the innovation.

Reconstruction, which is like hdb. Of course we can retrofit an engine. But you know, the new HDBs, they are all prefabricated, slightly newer.

In a sense. And the question is, since.

Your heart units will be lifted up anyway, we install PV already. When you stand on the ground when it's being developed and then when you lift it up, you automatically lift up like a LEGO plate, you have your integrated PV system right away. That's one thing that we work with one of the construction companies which supplies 2 HDB this prefabricated. We're looking into fire safety also for lightweight PV which is much more challenging than for heavy glass solar panels. That's something which we also need to obviously keep in the banks of our mind.

And good reason we have to invest.

The final thing I want to mention is as I said, if at the very beginning when the new building is about to be designed or be created, at that moment IPV is not present either that never happens or is much more expensive and at that moment IPV to be integrated to.

Because it all depends on software tools and if it's not integrated into BIM and we are working on this quite extensively. So we have performed labor for each step of the BIM process floor. We need to add the IP in order to add the time when it's needed like any other building materials being designed.

So that's some of the work packages we're currently driving to see how can we from different angles so they become a natural part of it and it becomes part of solar architecture. That's my last slide. I believe that we need to think much bigger can we do solar energies? Can we do overarching less than real needle movers Just adding a few solar panels to an existing HD creating something which is beyond what we have today.

This is one example from China which has integrated this is Singapore actually we already have it basically by ITE essential. It's just it's not solar.

Just need to the final step and add solar wherever possible and make solar architecture a natural thing to.

So like we said I thank you.

Very much for your attention.

Here are we.

Do we have any very urgent questions? That cannot wait. That's great. So let's move on due to time for the next presentation and I would like to welcome Francis Buston Lee to the finch who is associate professor at NTO Nanyang Technology and he's the director.

Of International Networks at the National Supercomputing.

Center in Singapore with a focus on grid out computing data Big Data has published all the papers that he saw and has played key roles in establishing and managing research landlords like the Singapore Advanced Research and Innovation Network.

And the Trans Eurasia Information Network.

And he of course also PI of the Burn City module where with this expertise in data sciences the package on data integration for PPE and.

Solar and he will talk about using data to link solar energy and electric utility. Francis, thank you. Thank you and let's also welcome Francis.

So I think the audio is not.

So good for the online participants for.

Information the microphone should be somewhere on the ceiling.

If you could.

Okay.

I mean the first time we had it was about two years ago it is even bigger and they showed the interest of the community in PVS and VIPVs. Okay.

We talk about data exercise and how we bring data into it to help us understand.

Ideal.

Singapore okay.

Limited and so we.

Have to use that data to generate more data.

What will happen is the number of.

Cable yeah and then.

Is one source of taking care of it.

Electric.

This is what delicious.

Okay.

You know I'm trying To look at 80% all passenger is going to be evince how much we're talking about we're talking about maybe compared to current is about half million.

Yeah.

How we make efficient use of it.

We go we sit on a TV we sit on our headphone and the power goes up then even doesn't help exaggerate.

And so.

Basically.

Where the person is.

And instead of using data we get no coverage Resolution network okay.

Design.

We didn't create it but they made use of it.

Resolution data and from there.

Okay.

When you're not going to decide which are you.

Donations.

Going up so the evening still.

Okay. So here the one you consume at home and that's where it's a little bit more problematic.

Very glad you showed the data.

How.

Much potential we can generate 3.6 people want okay so we have one that is lower 2.5 what is.

Any genome and then based on the estimation 8.6 gigawatt and we talk about.

Very nice level.

That gives you values down there so EV only if you have PV only.

You can see the difference during the.

Daytime and then PV90Pmeans V to G.

Become.

Storage and we can put that back up okay.

And don't need to have so much space for storage Otherwise we need a.

Lot of project data for them.

Increases the rise of.

Mobile battery.

Generated generated by fossil fuel Then we still need popule plants which are.

There's actually a number of them behind the scene on the bridge.

Basically I say the same thing down there. Okay.

So either most income.

Level district level is residential.

EV load on it okay and you see the people on there.

Depending on its usage.

Different characteristics and we have differently duplicated form.

This is Jenny power grid and.

2 years ago 2021 actually call a tender I think was.

Infrastructure the charging stations and all those. And also what do they need to.

Do to meet the needs.

Charges.

Okay is huge okay.

For that.

So before that.

Understanding of what good.

Over here, you know.

And.

And so.

Okay has a spawn coming up this side, you see. So our generator drops and this is later on in day.

I think there is a need for variety.

And this basically what's the power on the power line, how much it is? You know usually it's 80%. When there's hundreds on the normal things you get about 213%.

So.

You see that.

That.

Using a lot of data.

We found that very useful. But we need to supplement that with generated data.

Information Advisors reduction with TB and EV show D to G reduced grade low variability by using fine grade facial temporal ability.

As a part of it. They did some work storage.

How can you do that and change the urban legends time? Basically one of our researchers working on that. If the land use change how that change? And we want to share with you a good news the answer with Jesuit. He's right at the. He just came back in September he had a paper that won the application paper award.

International Conference of Energy Transport Systems.

You know.

So it's a.

So we are doing not a lot on time but I'm confident we can finish it.

Nevertheless.

We will now activate this microphone because I have heard that the microphone is not working well let's try that out first.

Okay.

And let's go to the next talk.

As a next presenter we have Professor Yuming Fu who was just introduced by Francis and he's an economist specializing in urban economics focusing on housing choices, real estate, market efficiency and labor mobility. With his research published and leading academic journals. He's an associate professor at NUS with joint appointments in the Department of Architecture and Real Estate. Professor Fu has advised on housing and urban policy for governments in China, Hong Kong and Singapore. With his current research exploring urban challenges related to climate adaptation, technology and social well being. In Paris City he is leading the urban economic research and we are looking forward now to your talk on integrated land use planning for renewable energy. Welcome to the floor.

And you have to lose this one.

But the microphone is here.

So just.

Oh no. If you speak here and I'm sure. But you use this one.

Okay, thank you very much. Yeah. So as Christopher introduced. I'm in both Department of Real Estate body of and Department of Architecture Lan Kipo. So I'm going to approach this from two perspectives. One is urbanism and the other is economic incentives. Okay. So Profsin is a co PI of this work package.

Let me prophesy this talk by saying that any error in this talk will be.

Solely mine because I'll be talking about kind of experimental ideas behind this topic. Integrated land use and energy planning. It's untested, so it's risky. But the idea is informed by our research in the past couple of years. Okay?

Okay. So it's inspired by this idea of systems approach to energy transition and climate resilience. And in particular we're thinking about three urban transformations that are necessary for climate resilience and decarbonization that we have to achieve. One is energy transition from fuel based energy system to renewable energy system. And second is cooling.

The urban heat island effect. It's a serious challenge for cities. So we have to reduce a urban heat island effect and also reduce our reliance on aircon.

Okay.

Because it's kind of create more adaptation for the urban heat. And the third transformation we have to do is to create car large cities to reduce the reliance on car and.

Improve walkability and bicycle friendliness of our city. Okay, so two kind of big corporate for urban heat. One is car, the other is air console as well. You know, it create heat, right. So we need to.

Kind of reduce these two things. Aircon and Carla city and.

VIPV or urban integrated PV can help these two other transformations. So if we couple these three transformations together, then we can maximize the co benefit of each transformation and this is how we can create big momentum to advance these three transformations. So that's the kind of basic idea.

Okay, so this is a little bit experimental idea. So we always, you know, we have this perception that Singapore is too small and the population density is too high. So it's kind of unreal realistic to think about energy self sufficiency. Okay. I have a colleague in the business school, he's from Finland and he asked me, you know, in Finland, in Helsinki you can see solar panels everywhere. And he asked why we don't see solar panels everywhere in Singapore. We have a lot of things here that got me thinking.

I did this, a very crude ballpark calculation to look at Singapore's potential solar potential for energy self sufficiency looking at the electricity supply self sufficiency. So we know that Singapore's annual solar irradiation is between 1,580 to 1620 kilowatt hour per square meter. Okay? So based on that data, so I just use the lower bound and assume PV efficiency, convert solar irradiation to electricity 25% which is now kind of achievable, then we can Get a rough number. So the solar electricity generation capacity in Singapore will be about 0.4 kilowatt hour per square kilometer per year. Okay, so I'm going to use that number to look at the.

Electricity generation for different land use in Singapore. Okay, so we have a total area of. Okay, so it's a hectare, 76,600 hectare or 766 square kilometers residential use about 17%. So that's based on the planning for 2030. Okay, so if we assume okay for residential use, industry, commerce use, community and land transport infrastructure use, for those land use, we can cover 1/3 of the land use with PV. Okay, that's not a, you know, unrealistic kind of assumption. Right, so think about a average scientifical building footprint is about 1/3 of the lot size in Singapore. Okay, so kind of 1/3 coverage by PV. Okay. Not just rooftop, but also the open space. All right. Streets and so on. Okay, so if we can achieve 1/3 of PV coverage, then my calculation shows that for the land use we can generate more than 17 terawatt hour per year.

And the residential energy consumption in 2022 was less than 8 per year. Residential values can generate a surplus of more than nine per year. Now industry, commerce, land use of course use more energy. Okay, so they would have a deficit 27 at kilowatt hour a year. But we can generate surplus from community institute, land use.

Land transport, infrastructure and reservoir. Okay, so now we're already covering reservoir. Right, so that that's not far fetched. Okay, so overall we can get like 12 kilowatt hour per year surplus. Okay, so you know, kind of based on this rough calculation, self sufficiency in electricity supply is.

A possibility.

So given that possibility, we can think about.

Solar energy self sufficiency kind of scenario. And that scenario how we should manage the solar electricity use in Singapore. Okay, so how this is the idea how we can achieve IPV coverage in urban land use. So this is an extension of vipb. So we're not just looking at covering facade and we think it's probably more advantage by creating shade instead of covering facade.

Okay.

Because a shade can cool the facade and reduce the heat gain of the building. And it also allow facade to be more open, to be more flexible, responsive to weather condition outside, to achieve interior thermal comfort. Right, so this is kind of important building design. I mean Cabozia had a lot of design ideas to create this kind of facade to to regulate the thermal comfort inside building without using aircon. Right. Okay, so in Israel, this is academy, they have a handguard for shape. Okay, so like the streets, you know, park areas, open space required to be shaded. And those are the requirements. How much of space should be skated? Right, so they're from 20% to 80%. So a lot of space should be shaded. And shading creates, you know, economic.

Benefit in terms of reduce the cooling load and social benefit by making all the space more useful.

Okay.

So.

And if we couple these three, transformation.

And then. Okay, so so the, the benefit is that with extensive shading we can create a more walkable environment.

Okay.

So that will contribute to the color transition and with color light, okay. Then it will make the, all those space even, you know, great thermal comfort and acoustic comfort. Right. And the pedestrian safe. So it will encourage active mobility. Okay. Reduce tide use. And that can free up space, road space for more shaded space in Singapore. And also when the outdoor thermal comfort increase and acoustic comfort increase, then we can redesign the building to make for some more open, more responsive to the weather conditions to achieve thermal comfort inside without using air. Okay, so to kind of answer Francis question, what's the solution about ev? My recommendation is to reduce EV as well.

You know, reduce the car use. Okay. So that's one part of the solution. But the other important part is that we want to create a energy community. Okay. So consider a self sufficiency scenario. So we want to empower individual communities in Singapore to manage their solar electricity self sufficiency. So including ev, including cooling, energy use.

Including shading, all these things. So we create the energy communities and create business models to manage energy communities for them to manage the intermittency along the balance. It's very complicated, Right. I think we already have heard what Francis talked about, how to balance the supply demand at different time. It's very complicated. And by a decentralized management at a community level, we can accelerate innovation and I think we can.

Move this thing faster. So we need a lot of experimentation and innovation. Right. To solve all these problems. Yeah. So energy community.

They can engage professionals to provide.

Energy asset operation in the communities, investment financing and the risk management, you know, for the solar assets. Energy assets and urban design, the building retrofitting to optimize PV coverage. All right. And the energy community can participate in the capacity market, energy market and accelerate service markets like a EV charging.

And. Okay, but we need the kind of policy to a create momentum now to encourage the development of energy community in Singapore. So policies like solar mandate, cool roof and the shade targets, planning requirement and electricity tariff design and so on can create incentives for community solar investment.

All Right.

Okay, so okay, so we.

Have done a lot of research, okay. To look at energy communities, their performance and the various scenarios, how that their performance, the incentive to invest in a solar asset is affected by policies and the land use and so on. Okay, so okay, so here we have a research team. Jidong is the main person who there's all the other modeling and Christoph also help with the energy simulation. So what we developed is the capability to integrate land use data model like a city knowledge graph. It's also developed in fcl, the energy simulation models in this harness city module and the energy system optimization model. Zhidong is expert here. And then we can model the.

Energy system performance for communities in different contexts under different policy scenarios. Right, so that's what we did.

Okay, so this is kind of the framework of the modeling. So we coupled the digital urban land use regulation data model, the building energy simulation model and energy system optimization model. And then we can explore various performance objectives with different land use and tariff design and other scenarios. Okay, so try to see how this energy community can work and what are the economic incentives for investment. Okay, so this one example of different kind of hypothetical communities we studied.

Okay.

And.

Some of the results looking at how much self sufficiency you can achieve under two solar scenarios. One is a solar lease without trading between buildings and then advanced energy community model where.

There'S internal trade of electricity, okay. From different buildings distributed. Okay, so this is just show you how this energy simulation in energy community context, how it works. Right, so the blue buildings export electricity. So this is a one day simulation on hourly basis looking at hourly electricity flow from building that export electricity which is blue and the building that import electricity which is yellow.

Okay, I'll stop here.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

One question from Thomas, one burning question.

So we probably have to sit down.

And look a little bit at the assumptions. So for the PV roadmap, we also did the modeling how much the 36.8 square kilometers can yield in solar power and what would be the future demand in 20, 30, 40, which goes up of course with EVs so roundabout.

The.

Share the fraction of solar to contribute to the future energy mix is in the range of 10%. So we have to be careful not to give this vision that we can be self sustainable. We will never be able to be self sustainable with solar power in Singapore. It's sad to say, but we included all areas floating near shore, everything. So we have to be a bit careful not to give the impression that Singapore could power or even have A surplus from solar. So it's 10%. Unfortunately no more. That's what work from Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia in the future to decarbonize the drink.

We have to probably look a little bit.

That's probably the reality. But I think we still can do a lot more. And we can.

But not to extend 100%.

Yeah, but also this the energy not just about the increase energy supply, but also try to reduce the.

Yeah.

Consumption load.

Right.

By making the rebound are then we.

Can reduce.

And reduce.

There was actually one question from the online audience and maybe urban planning question from Kelvin Wong and he asks we have outdoor parking lots, a lot of parking. Outdoor parking lots, but fully shaded by trees. How can we install PV in our context?

I mean, you know, it's a mix of three and kidney and other shape.

Okay, okay. So the answer.

Okay, maybe.

Not exclusively.

Okay, so yeah, so.

This experiment they combine EV and the green and refractive coating.

Right.

Okay.

So the green rule actually increase the PV efficiency as well.

Okay, so the answer was for the online audience that there are mutual design solutions where both greenery and PV might benefit from each other. The cooling effect from vegetation, for example. So yes, it shades, but there might be solutions combining both together. So we are coming now to our last presentation. Not all too bad with the time only overshooting by 25 minutes already.

And I'm very happy to have Alexander Holbeck here. He is an associate professor for computational sustainable design at the Chalmers University in Sweden. So he came a long way to Singapore. Now in his research he is developing methods and tools that facilitate the design of sustainable buildings in cities. And the digital tools are used to assess, optimize and visualize the designs, energy and lifecycle performance in real time for early stage decision making. He is co founder and scientific advisor at kala, a software and consulting startup based in Munich, Germany. In Power in the city, he's leading the research on life cycle and environmental assessment of pv. And in his presentation he will talk about new tools, integrated planning and assessment. Welcome Alexander.

Thank you very much for this kind introduction. Microphone is here and I try to do my presentation in minus 25 minutes. So let's see.

And it's a great pleasure to be here the first time in Singapore, but it's also great pleasure to present a a range of tools that were developed during this project. And before I will go into the tools that you can then later check out in the demo app at 5 yourself and to start with wrong button.

With a little idea behind the tool development. So in general I think the developing tools are a great way to disseminate results. Arnold mentioned publications, our main business, and it's great to publish and get citations. But if we want to reach out to practice, tools are one great way of doing so. But it's a long way from developing a tool that we use in research, which is often the main idea to fill a research gap, to be novel, to be unique in one way, to then apply it in practice. And one intermediate step that I find is very promising is use those tools in education. It's a bit a test of everything that can go wrong in using such a tool and then doing the final step to do in practice. And of course, if we want, as I said in the tools and research, we can live with a higher complexity as long as fulfills this need. But then if we want to go to education, we often realize that our students need more support, so. So the user friendliness becomes more important. And if we want to go and practice while the user experience a lot when people will actually use the tool or not. And we heard just when I arrived this morning, a user of the City Energy Analysis. It's great. So much happened in one year and now it becomes intuitive. So that's often the real barrier of using a tool. But of course then the challenge in this practice can also inform us as registers and developing new tools. So with this set, I want to guide you through hypothetical examples of how you can use the tools that were developed here. So imagine you're a consultant and you're asked by the client to renovate a building.

And this building could be any building here in Singapore or anywhere else in the world. And potential solution. We heard how great VIPV is. So you want to check the potential on this building. But if you're not as lucky as Thomas and have access to the great model of Singapore, maybe you don't know anything about the building, but you probably have an address. So the first thing you might do, or I would do is go on Google Maps and check out where the building is and what it looks like. And only a picture of the facade, which we.

Input enough for this tool that Aisha developed. So using state segmentation to actually look at the facade, analyze the potential for pv. And if you add some parameters of where you are and what technology you want to use, you can directly get a first estimation of the potential yield.

But this tool just looks at one building facade and it doesn't include the urban surroundings. And we heard shading is important. So another tool that was developed to look at this Was this called solar gun? So using machine learning algorithms, I'm only looking at a fisheye image of the streetscape to then estimate the solar radiance on a specific facade and actually give you these hourly profiles.

And then the next step you might to think about, well, what does this actually cost? But not only in Singapore dollars or euros, but also in embodied carbon. And there was this work of Alina to actually look at the module and then establish a large database of all the options that you could have for the different module setups. But this alone is difficult to use. So Justin Alina developed this great tool where you can have a configurator online so you can select the module type, select also the production locations which would influence the grid mix and the embodied carbon related to production. You see some climate indicators here, you also see other environmental indicators at the bottom. But you can also play with the parameters of self consumption and the grid emission and you get this magical point.

Where the curves meet which show you.

How much irradiance you need on a facade so that it makes sense from environmental perspective or carbon perspective. Want to know more details? You can talk to the researchers then at five. So now we defined a module type and we're happy with it. The question is if we then want to apply this on a facade, how should we actually do it? And here just develop this panel layout tool which also takes into account shading or partial shading from trees or other facades and then develops this optimized layout based on the individual cell tells and also tells you how to connect the modules in the best way to have the. Yeah.

So we're happy with this and we have our great VIP V facade. Maybe we want to even go a step further and actually look at renovation of the whole building. So there are previous tools where that have been developed independently, but where the project contributed. So you could look at the building surfaces with the Hive tool or if you want to look at the whole else, aim also include the environmental aspects from the facade or other aspects. There's a tool Bombix, all based on the Grasshopper and Rhino environment.

And finally to come to the urban integration you're building, probably not alone, so you can integrate or look at the integration in the urban setting with the city and energy amongst. So in summary, we have this hypothetical tool chain. So if you only know the address, you can start looking at the potential with the segment for solar tool that you can check out there on the counter. Then we could have this solar gun to assess the urban situation. Next step, look at embodied carbon, choose a PV type, do the panel layout and even the whole building concept for the integration and the setting to then finally have the optimized urban BPI console. So that's all checked. But we heard that it's not only the building alone. We heard EV is important. So as an outlook, the idea is we could link this also to those tools and look at how the building interacts with ev or in other step of how this links to then the energy communities to for example, take the model from Gitong and link it to the tools.

Now I said if you're here at five year, please check out the tools. You can test them yourself even you're now online. Or you then you have the chance to check out the engagement platform where all the tools are now present. And the easiest way is to scan this QR code with your phone. Thank you very much.