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Clean heating transformation and photovoltaic (PV) promotion gradually have become the keys to realize dual carbon strategy goals. Based on this, the combined application of building-integrated PV (BIPV) systems and air-source heat pump (ASHP) systems has received widespread attention. However, the current combined system still presents problems such as the mismatching in time between PV output and heating load. Therefore, in this paper, a novel BIPV and ASHP coupling system is proposed, and the operation parameters were optimized using low-carbon community as an example. A conventional PV and heat pump (HP) combined system, ASHP heating, and coal-fired heating were employed as the baseline and compared with the novel system. The results show that the optimized system can improve the PV power local accommodation rate by 43% compared with a conventional PV and ASHP coupling system. In terms of economic and environmental benefits, the operating cost of the optimized system is 50% of the cost of the ASHP system. Compared with coal-fired heating system, the annual air pollutant and carbon emissions can be reduced by 92% and 57%, respectively. The system also can improve the stability of power grid operation. The demand for power capacity can be improved by 62% and the annual load balance of the power grid can be improved by 29.5%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promoting the sharing of idle resources to community residents is a potential means to building a low-carbon community. This study examined three communities with different attributes (college/university, middle and high income, and the elderly). An extended hypothesis model was constructed based on the theory of planned behavior. The influencing factors of community residents facing idle resource-sharing services were explored. Based on the equal sampling method, 100 questionnaires were randomly distributed in each community to verify the validity of the hypothesis model. The results show that residents' attitudes, subjective behavioral norms, perceived behavioral control, service expectations, and environmental motivations positively influence residents' behavioral intention to share their idle resources. The residents' service expectations for idle resource-sharing are the most critical. Moreover, in terms of community attributes, its attitudes, subjective behavioral norms, and perceived behavioral control significantly influence residents' behavioral intention to share idle resources. Specifically, the attitudes in the middle- and high-income community have opposite effects on residents from the attitudes in the college/university community and the elderly community. The hypothesis model proposed in this study provides a reference for building a low-carbon community from the perspective of residents' restriction of resource-sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global warming is a worldwide concern, with buildings generating more than 40% of the annual global CO2 emissions. A commonly accepted system of global standards for zero-carbon buildings and communities has not yet been established. In this research, the development history, hotspots, and trends at the urban scale with theoretical and data support are summarized based on the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. The review contains works from 1997 to 2022. A total of 19,014 papers were collected, with an overall increasing trend in the number of articles with specific keywords. The scope of the research is broad, covering the environment, sciences, ecology, chemistry, material science, physics, meteorology, atmospheric sciences, and so on. The hotspots in the low-carbon community (LCC) and zero-carbon community (ZCC) involve a wide range of disciplines, and collaborative research between related disciplines should be strengthened to propose practical solutions for the development of zero-carbon cities. The establishment of the ZCC mainly focuses on a zero-carbon-emission construction and zero-carbon operations. This research found approaches such as the choices of building construction and material, a waste recycling system, a regenerating energy system, transportation, and an examination of the community composition to realize the ZCC. In the literature it is presented that the difficulties in the construction of the ZCC are due to the lack of research in practice, operation, and subsequent maintenance. Moreover, other scholars can deepen the research on the hotspots of ZCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of society and the economy and the increasing seriousness of environmental problems, renewable energy and high-quality energy services in low-carbon communities have become popular research topics. However, a large number of volatile distributed generation power systems in the community are connected to the grid. It is difficult to stabilize and efficiently interact with fragmented and isolated energy management systems, and it is difficult to meet energy management needs in terms of low-carbon emissions, stability, and intelligence. Therefore, by considering operation costs, pollution control costs, energy stability, and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, this article proposes a regional energy supply model called community energy Internet and builds a low-carbon community energy adaptive management model for smart services. Then, to address energy supply instability, an adaptive feedback control mechanism developed based on model predictive control is introduced to adapt to the changing environment. Finally, a long short-term memory-recurrent neural network-based Tabu search is introduced to prevent the multiobjective particle swarm optimization algorithm from easily falling into a local optimum. The simulation results show that the proposed model can effectively realize the optimal allocation of energy, which solves the problem of fragmented energy islands caused by distributed power access. This method has quality of service benefits for users, such as cost, time, and stability, and realizes wide interconnections, high intelligence, and low-carbon efficiency of community energy management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, in order to promote the construction of low-carbon communities (LCCs) in China, many scholars have proposed an evaluation indicator system of LCC. The existing indicator systems are mostly established from the macro perspective of environmental impact and resource conservation, but few are from the micro technical perspective. Thus, the aim of this study is to construct a micro technical evaluation indicator system for LCCs. Firstly, the index system was divided into three categories: low-carbon building, low-carbon transportation, and low-carbon environment. Then, the technical indicators were selected through empirical analysis. The indicator weights were assigned by the improved analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the multi-level fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method was used as the evaluation method of the indicators. Finally, in order to examine the practicality of the indicator system, two typical communities in Tianjin and Shanghai were selected as case studies. The results showed that the indicator system gave a reasonable low-carbon level for the two communities, which was in line with the actual low-carbon construction status of each community. In addition, the evaluation results pointed out that the low-carbon community (LCC) in Tianjin needs to further strengthen the construction of the low-carbon environment, including community compactness, rainwater collection and utilization, and waste recycling. For the LCC in Shanghai, it was pointed out that the construction of the low-carbon building and low-carbon transportation needs to be strengthened. The indicator system can be used as a tool for urban planning and construction personnel to evaluate the construction progress and low-carbon degree of LCC.

People’s social behavior, especially environmental behavior, has a great impact on energy consumption and carbon emission. This paper explores both categories of individual factors (e.g., values, habits, education, motivation, etc.) and social factors (e.g., institution, infrastructure, encouragement, etc.), to clarify the correlation between them and their sub-factors. Low-carbon campus is a representative type of low-carbon community which is less difficult to build than other communities because university students are well-educated and, to some extent, are more environmental aware and more willing to change their behaviors. The energy-saving and environment-friendly policies implemented on campus are collected and overviewed in this paper. Additionally, the leaders and employees from the related administration departments are interviewed, and the data of electricity amount and water usage are analyzed and a well-designed questionnaire is handed out in a survey. The survey investigates the environmental knowledge, energy use habits, attitude toward low-carbon transformation, comments on the current institution and so on. The results show that different groups of students have varied levels of environmental knowledge, energy use habits, and attitude toward low-carbon campus management. To improve energy conservation and cut carbon emission radically, advices on building low-carbon community are also proposed including professional curriculums of environmental protection, economic initiatives, effect management, good communications, and sound infrastructures and facilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Integrated energy system (IES) is characterized by high self-consumption ratio of on-site generated renewable energy, high efficiency of conventional energy utilization and possesses a significant flexibility in its operation. This overall, constitute to the foundation of low-carbon communities. Considering economic and environmental benefits, this paper proposes a two-layer co-optimization model with the upper layer optimizing the IES configuration and the lower layer optimizing IES operation. A community in Beijing is introduced as a case study to analyze the benefits of IES and compared with the conventional energy system. Multiple scenarios are researched, including (a) IES for low-carbon communities with PV roof area limitation, (b) IES for each of the four building types with PV roof area limitation, (c) IES for low-carbon communities without PV roof area limitation. The results indicate that the optimized IES for community can reduce the cost by 25% and CO 2 emissions by 32% per year by considering the limitation of roof area for the PV system. Without this constraint, the costs and emissions could be reduced by 20% and 62%, respectively. In addition, IES is more appropriate for office and commercial buildings since their load characteristics allow for load shifting and community-level IES costs and emissions are 8% and 10% lower than building-level due to the complementary of community load. This study provides suggestions for the IES planning and application in low-carbon community. [Display omitted] • An IES with multiple renewable energy and energy storage subsystems is proposed. • A two-layer co-optimization model of IES design and operation is developed. • IES optimization results for building-level and community-level are compared. • Impact of roof area limitation for PV on IES optimization results is investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the energy and environmental problems of human society has become increasingly prominent, distributed energy system (DES) is gained more and more attention and widely used. Community Secondary Energy Trading Markets (CSEM) was established to: 1) deal with the challenge of the sheer variability of local renewable energy; 2) maximizing DES efficiency. In CSEM, we suppose secondary energy is a general manufactured products and it can be traded between different stakeholders. The transaction of secondary energy commodity between different secondary energy consumers and producers based on the trading price, which price is depend on secondary energy production cost and transportation cost. The comparison of CSEM and traditional primary energy markets has been examined. CSEM's mechanism of action and structure also has been introduced. At last, we indicated that urban detailed plan can play a core role to promote the implementation of CSEM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Climate Challenge Fund (CCF) is the Scottish Government's flagship initiative addressing the twenty-first century's core concern: environmental challenges. The CCF seeks to reduce carbon emissions explicitly through community. Building on community's long and strong social science heritage, this paper outlines the CCF's tacit and unspoken community assumptions. Through these assumptions, this policy (re)produces, prefigures and performs a particular form of community, this being community's elision with locality, and synonym for place, rurality or neighbourhood. Taking on these tacit assumptions is demonstrative of their belief in the effectiveness of such community. After exploring the CCF, its source and structure, the paper delves into empirical work situated at all levels of the CCF's funding chain. It then teases out how the assumptions around - and the need to demonstrate - community help determine the projects selected, and subsequently the vision of community chosen, enacted and mobilised. The CCF (re) produces a particular vision of community with implications for who receives funding, how environmental action is framed and also for the future of community in Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Delivering low-carbon communities requires an understanding of community practices and technologies, strategies and constraints associated with and accessed by communities. However, little research to date has investigated the application of green technologies as well as green strategies in achieving low-carbon communities. This paper first reviewed low-carbon technologies and strategies in the previous literatures and then examines how these technologies and strategies are addressed in two ongoing low-carbon communities. By comparing the differences of adopting various low-carbon technologies and strategies in the two cases, it is found that green strategies are not as valued as green technologies in the current stage of low-carbon communities in China. The ten One Planet Living principles are not fully considered and comprehensively implemented, and there is also lack of a clear and harmonious inter-sector working mechanism within and between energy, transport, waste management and water management sectors. Recommendations are proposed to provide a vehicle for a more effective and efficient use of green technologies as well as green strategies to reduce carbon emissions in low-carbon communities. Research findings in the study may therefore provide valuable references to guide low-carbon community development. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Excessive carbon emissions pose a significant threat to the sustainable development of society and have an irreversible impact on climate change. Local energy trading in low-carbon communities and the implementation of carbon tax policy are considered effective means to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. In this regard, this paper proposes a multi-energy sharing mechanism based on Nash bargaining theory among communities with distributed energy systems. The impact of heterogeneous carbon emission responsibilities, including production responsibility, consumption responsibility, and shared responsibility, on the economic and environmental benefits of shared communities is explored under a carbon tax policy. The distributed solution of the multi-energy sharing problem is carried out through the alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm, which protects the privacy of stakeholders and maximizes social welfare and the fair allocation of shared benefits. Additionally, sensitivity analyses of electric and thermal coupling loads, carbon emission accounting coefficients, and carbon taxes, are conducted to provide further insights into the optimal schedule of distributed energy systems and the economic and environmental performance of community clusters. The method proposed in this paper can effectively address the problem of multi-energy sharing in the interconnected communities and reasonably determine the carbon emission responsibility of each trading entity under the carbon tax policy. Numerical results show that, compared with the traditional no energy sharing scenario, the proposed sharing mechanism can achieve a maximum of 5.91% cost savings and 9.25% carbon emission reduction. In addition, under the production responsibility scheme, the communities show the best economic performance, while under the consumption responsibility scheme, the communities achieve excellent environmental benefit. [Display omitted] • A Nash bargaining based community P2P multi-energy sharing mechanism is proposed. • Different carbon emission responsibilities are considered in the P2P sharing problem. • Distributed solving ensures the autonomy and privacy of participants. • The economic and environmental performance under different scenarios are compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, in order to promote the construction of low-carbon communities (LCCs) in China, many scholars have proposed an evaluation indicator system of LCC. The existing indicator systems are mostly established from the macro perspective of environmental impact and resource conservation, but few are from the micro technical perspective. Thus, the aim of this study is to construct a micro technical evaluation indicator system for LCCs. Firstly, the index system was divided into three categories: low-carbon building, low-carbon transportation, and low-carbon environment. Then, the technical indicators were selected through empirical analysis. The indicator weights were assigned by the improved analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the multi-level fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method was used as the evaluation method of the indicators. Finally, in order to examine the practicality of the indicator system, two typical communities in Tianjin and Shanghai were selected as case studies. The results showed that the indicator system gave a reasonable low-carbon level for the two communities, which was in line with the actual low-carbon construction status of each community. In addition, the evaluation results pointed out that the low-carbon community (LCC) in Tianjin needs to further strengthen the construction of the low-carbon environment, including community compactness, rainwater collection and utilization, and waste recycling. For the LCC in Shanghai, it was pointed out that the construction of the low-carbon building and low-carbon transportation needs to be strengthened. The indicator system can be used as a tool for urban planning and construction personnel to evaluate the construction progress and low-carbon degree of LCC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]