Infomorphism: An Urban Planning Approach for Equitable Access to Renewable Energy

As with urban planning, which promotes fair access to fresh air, sunlight, and water for buildings through policies, zoning regulations, and building codes, renewable-energy-dependent buildings also require equitable access to renewable energy sources such as solar or geothermal energy. Achieving this requires the development of an integrated planning framework that can ensure equitable access to these resources. To this end, we propose an extension to the Infomorphism framework, which optimizes urban local energy networks to enable the exchange and sharing of renewable energy resources among buildings. This paper demonstrates how the extended Infomorphism framework can be used to explore potential planning policies aimed at providing equitable access to local renewable energy for buildings. Specifically, it was found that the ability to rezone as well as the ability to change the Floor Area Ratio (FAR) of building blocks in an urban fabric can reduce the levelized energy cost and increase renewable energy integration while maintaining common access to it.