Economic evaluation of Nearly Zero Energy Cities

As a contribution to the study of the urban energy transition, this paper proposes a novel model of energy-economic evaluation of the cities self-sufficiency and presents its application in the form of a case study. The objective of this study was to analyse the scope of the investment in the photovoltaic self-consumption of buildings in order to promote the creation of Prosumers communities within the cities. The operation of this model is based on the scalability of the Nearly Zero Energy concept from buildings to cities and seeks to evaluate Nearly Zero Energy Cities (nZEC): cities made up of Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (nZEB) and other installations of distributed generation to cover their energy demand by use of local renewable resources to the detriment of external resources. By using public data, we apply this model with the aim of economically evaluating the investment of six packages of energy rehabilitation and photovoltaic self-consumption in 17% of the residential buildings (37,800) in the city of Barcelona. To do this, we simulated 37 years of electricity distribution among Consumers, Producers and a hypothetical peer-to-peer community of Prosumers during the period 2014–2050 in hourly time intervals. The results indicated that the photovoltaic self-consumption and the local markets of Prosumers help to reduce primary energy consumption, the energy costs, and the CO2 emissions.