CNC Report 08.26.24 8.5x11 - Flipbook - Page 128
04 TIMELINE TOOL
Time-Value and Categorization of Carbon Emissions
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In order to effectively fight climate change, reducing carbon emissions in the short-term is crucial.
In that context it might seem somewhat counterintuitive to promote strong changes to an urban
environment that require upfront carbon emissions, even if they are distributed over a couple of
years. But nonetheless, these upfront emissions are necessary to ensure a fast transition to a more
sustainable urban district.
One could imagine these necessary upfront emissions as “good” carbon emissions for things
like PV-panels, building retrofits or streetscape transformations as they are leading to reduced
operational carbon emissions. For measures like PV and building retrofits, it is proven that the
“carbon payback” time is only a couple of years (in the range of 5-10). After this time, these
measures will only create more positive impact by avoiding carbon emissions that would have
been otherwise emitted.
Why A Timeline Is Important
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Besides the obvious benefit of being able to consider temporal changes in emission factors or the
year of certain interventions (e.g. retrofits or new builds), a timeline tool is a visually compelling
way of representing the incremental change that comes with every measure and to see the initially
small rate of change gaining increasingly more weight over time.
Therefore, it is a way of showing the effect of daily, or in this case yearly, “habits” either bad or
good.
Why Nation-Wide Grid Emission Reduction Is Important
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Efforts to locally reduce carbon emissions (e.g. building efficiency and transportation) and to
locally produce renewable energy (e.g. with PV on rooftops and parking lot canopies) are crucially
important to reduce a city’s impact on climate change.
Nonetheless, cities are not disconnected from the grid and even in a “carbon neutral corridor” still
need to pull energy from it during certain times. In other cases, communities might not have the
financial means of implementing all the necessary measures to move towards carbon neutrality.
Due to these reasons, a major focus of local and nation-wide legislation should be to transform the
existing grid in a way that it can cope with the changing needs of a more dynamic future energy
market (allow net-metering and feed in tariffs) and to promote large-scale renewable projects like
large wind or solar farms.
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archimania
Transsolar
KlimaEngineering
