IaaC blog

A full pdf of the presentation can be found here:

Here are the maps that I was responsible for producing, including a comparison of world energy usage, Australian Energy and Adelaide. A full size version can be found here:

instructions for the maps

overall
- total diagram of size of energy consumption per country based on american energy institute figures

these were translated into a comparable rate to give each country its own ’scale’ of energy consumption comparable to the production centres

conclusions
- australia has highest energy consumption - perhaps because of the distances involved in the distribution of energy
- india has quite low, yet delhi is 2 x as high as the national average (suggesting that the urbanisation of a country (india)
is increasing the rate of energy consumption.

- total energy production distribution per country as a venn diagram scaled to the proportion of the country’s usage

conclusions
- australia has no nuclear because of political bias
- australia has reliance on the fossil fuels becuase of its rich reserves in gas and coal.
- the australian fossil fuel market is protected by government concessions that make them more appealing than renewable

- Australia has the second cheapest electricity of any major developed nation (second only to South
Africa), it is considered sea based wind farms are just not yet currently viable in Australia.

australia

- connected by a networked grid
- losses of up to 7.5% due to energy transmission

south australia
energy productions in shades of blue (scaled in W/s output)
energy consumption in yellow (scaled per person)
shows distribution

- high transmission distances are increasing prices
- south australia has lots of good wind production centres, but they are up to 650km away
- solar is not cost effective due to infrastructure costs (small gov rebate)
- biogas used from existing dumps and sewage good potential

- hot rock thermal production will have national usage
- domestic wind cannot be connected back into the grid (disadvantage over solar)

hydrogen fuel cells have advantage of no infrastructure and distribution costs

preliminary innovation ideas-

-1. main innovation is to bring things closer to the grid. . .

http://www.beyondlogic.org/southaustraliapower/#Interconnects

i. Distributed Generation using Miniturbines or Fuel Cells

One of the fastest growing sectors in the energy industry at the
moment is Distributed Generation (DG) also known as Decentralised
Energy (DE). Currently about 7% of world wide generation is DG with
some countries such as Germany having as much as a 13% DG market share.

ii. wind generation back into the grid at a domestic level

iii solar hydrogen

It has been suggested if 1.6 million individual households equipped their roofs with 10m x
10m of solar hydrogen panels they would meet all of Australia’s energy
needs.

iv. tidal energy harvesting

2. By political / policy change
i increase subsidies for renewable sources - reduce proportionally those
on fossil fuels

ii increase the cost of electricity!

My diagram for renewable energy usage in Australia. I have tried to represent the individual nodes (cities with rings of distribution, from the city distribution, through transformer, down to the individual) and energy production types (located in states). The scale of each relates to the original map scale given as both people and energy consumption (though as Tomas noted, I need to check the accuracy of the scale). The locations of the cities and production sources are accurate according to their geographic distribution, not exact location - hence I am trying to understand the overall energy network distribution in Australia.

A full copy of the pdf can be found here

Work in progress for a map of renewable energy functions in Australia

My research into complex city programming and generation started by looking at the provided link to Nikos A. Salingaros. From the review of his book, ‘Principles of Urban Structure’ I could find, he worked with Christopher Alexander and shares some of his ideals about existing finding patterns for making cities in a more scientific manner. He proposes a fractal approach to city making, by which there is a direct relationship between the small and large scale, ‘It’s these small-scale connections and means of moving about the city that need to be strengthened for the contemporary city to be more humanistic.’ (ibid).

Through a keyword search urbanism+complexity+cities turned out some interesting articles. To summarise there are a lot of researchers in urban planning who are using Cellular Autonoma and theories of cell type growth to predict urban growth. ‘CA are a powerful tool for urban systems simulation and go some way towards remedying the deficiencies of traditional simulation models.’ (Torrens & O’Sullivan).

Of interest is an article by Australian researchers Ward , Murray & Phinn who in their research ‘An optimized cellular automata approach for sustainable urban development in rapidly urbanizing regions’ manage to manage to define a conceptual model for urban growth and simulate it on the rapidly growing Australian City of the Gold Coast. Their formulas account for a number of formulas both inhibiting and promoting the growth of urbanisation, specific to a location (as seen in the images below).

(image courtesy of authors website)

The second part of the article and conclusions result from factors taking into account the geography. They quote, ‘The growth of cities is influenced strongly by socio-economic and biophysical constraints, and institutional controls. Physical factors such as water bodies and steep terrain constrain growth as do institutional controls that prohibit growth. Economic factors such as distance from transport networks, distance from commercial outlets and land values also play a significant role.’ From here their model complexifies and compares favorably with the real example of the Gold Coast (a).

(image courtesy of authors website)

They cite Batty M, Xie Y, 1994, “From cells to cities” Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 21 Supplement, s31 – s48 as the main reference and a google search on this reference pointed towards other researchers doing similar studies / simulations and using them as one of their primary references, so it might be interesting in finding.

A link to the full .pdf can be found here and a movie, where i attempted to represent the concept of city as  moving mix can be found here.