Urban Greening as part ofDistrict Energy Services

Abstract: Work carried out during this master’s thesis is about urban greening and its close integration with district energy systems. Urban greening is the fact to develop green infrastructures (parks, street trees, ...) instead of grey infrastructures (buildings, roads, ...) in cities. Despite that the actual economic value of green infrastructure is less appreciated at first glance and very difficult to valorize, urban greening has many undeniable advantages such as reducing pollution and heat island effect. This report focuses essentially on the synergy between district cooling services and urban greening, but also on the decrease of pollution with reduction of particulate matter concentration. This thesis is made at ENGIE, a company which strives to become the world leader in energy transition and which already operates some large district cooling systems. One of the purposes of this study is to determine the benefits for ENGIE to invest in urban greening. To do so, a model is developed, taking into consideration an example from one district cooling system in Paris, France. All data, assumptions and models used are described in this report. Results show the clear benefits from an increased number of trees for the selected area. Economics are also part of the model, in order to evaluate the return on investment from urban greening. Globally, the model shows that urban greening as a strategy seems promising and district cooling system owners and operators like ENGIE together with city governments should invest in it. Furthermore, this could even provide more benefits in the future where green values should continue to increase.