Green Energy Lab: S/E/P II – Spatial Energy Planning for Energy Transition

The GEL S/E/P project series aims to significantly improve and expand processes in urban and municipal energy supply and energy transition planning by providing comprehensive and standardized spatial information in the form of geodata (energy atlas) as well as in the form of automated reports.

The energy atlas comprises, among other things, spatial information on buildings, energy demands, local renewable energy potentials and grid-based energy infrastructure as well as derived information such as zoning for renewable energy supply or density maps for energy and CO2e emissions. For specific use cases in local development planning, automated reports are provided based on the data basis from the energy atlas, for example spatial energy analyses on settlement and site level or energy and monitoring reports on community level. In addition, the project will ensure that the necessary legal framework for the constitution of spatial energy planning is brought to the attention of authorities and politicians.

In the first stage of the project (GEL S/E/P I), the consortium around the three federal provinces Vienna, Styria and Salzburg lays the ground for the implementation of SEP for the heating sector by developing the basic methodologies, processes, IT- and data-exchange requirements needed. Some of the planning authorities have already started to roll-out spatial energy planning in practice.

In the present follow-up project (GEL S/E/P II) the SEP system will be extended by the sectors mobility and electricity and thus a holistic and cross-sectoral information platform for spatial energy planning will be created. Further goals are the evaluation and improvement of the results achieved so far, as well as the support of the federal states in the process implementation of SEP both on a technical level (implementation in the federal state GIS systems) and on a regulatory level (definition of framework conditions for SEP together with authorities and politics).

The unique partner constellation of GEL S/E/P I is complemented in GEL S/E/P II by the energy grid operators as well as by expertise in the field of mobility and law. Overall, the project provides an excellent basis for the coordination of the energy transition, with replication potential throughout Austria and beyond.

The project is part of the Green Energy Lab research initiative and is funded by the Austrian Climate and Energy Fund.