Focusing on the sustainable urban development under the backgrounds of economy transformation and climate change, this project brings together the experts from EU and China to develop a Socio-Techno-Economic assessment framework to quantitatively investigate the policy design, operation optimization and market coordination of urban energy system, especially for integrated energy systems, citizen-driven demand side response and various types of energy storages. For this purpose, four work programmes are developed. Firstly, the market and institutional changes to support the urban energy system transformation will be investigated in an agent-based assessment framework.

Secondly, this project will develop novel decentralized control methods to coordinate the millions of active citizens under alternative market arrangement and availability of ICT infrastructure. Thirdly, the citizen-driven design method of the urban energy system will be developed. Finally, four cities (London, Beijing, Delft and Suzhou), representing large and medium as well as historic and new cities in EU and China, will be analysed in detail as the case studies. The findings will be summarized and the policy, business case and road map for urban energy transformation in the EU and China will be proposed.