Rapport intermédiaire n°1, Ecoquartier NEXUS Energie

The research project Ecoquartier NEXUS Energie aims at highlighting the scope of possibilities in the field of energy storage and intermittency management in urban blocs and districts. It focuses on the urban, organizational and political dimensions of the issue, along two time horizons: 2020 and 2040. The difference between these two dates lies mainly in the general action framework of the building and renovation sector. In 2020, the framework will be assumed to be very similar to the current one, while sets of assumptions about future institutional, political and economic regulations, be they local or national, will allow to build prospective scenarios to 2040. This research also aims at characterizing unexplored links and testing new ideas on energy management in cities and on the finest pieces of energy networks that, tomorrow, should be simultaneously production, consumption and storage sites. The concept of socio-energetic node is proposed: it is a set of elements that provide the storage, the bundling and the distribution of energy flows, and whose conception, supervised by a project manager, has involved the same actors over the period of time needed. The present intermediate report is the first research component of the Nexus project. It specifically focuses on existing sustainable districts and on those under construction, assuming that some innovative energy systems currently implemented in sustainable districts become the common core in cities by 2020. It addresses three goals: first, build a database and characterize the current energy systems in European sustainable districts; second, present four disciplinary states of the art on the energy issue in sustainable districts : geographical, political, technological, and business model approaches ; last, try to construct a typology of sustainable districts according to their governance and their energy dimension. The deliverable is composed of seven chapters and a summary of results. * Chapter 1 : definitions of the objects under study * Chapter 2 : review of the bibliography references collected * Chapter 3 : geographical analysis of sustainable districts * Chapter 4 : governance and actors' interactions in sustainable districts * Chapter 5 : analytical sheets of some energy technologies * Chapter 6 : construction of a typology of sustainable districts * Chapter 7 : energy business models : from buildings to sustainable districts To date, two presentations linked to this research have been accepted in international conferences.