Cities and optimizing energy consumption
Cities are global development centers that human future would be occurred in them. More than half of the world population lives in them, they are the centers of environmental challenges, and economic development.
Evidences indicate that urban population growth will be increased rapidly and they will be more than triple during 2000 to 2030. This will result in increasing for infrastructures such as road, energy, water, and ITC.
Cities are the economic engines producing more than 70 percent of the world GDP. For example, 100 large cities in the U.S. have devoted more than 75 of GDP to themselves; it is 60 percent in India with 30 percent of population of this country.
One of the most important goals of the countries is in line with achieving to economic growth and development. Efficiency means using useful and efficient of resources in production process considered more in developing countries after energy crisis in 1970s. It has been estimated 30 percent in the fifth development plan and it has been emphasized in paragraph 3 of general economic policy of resistance.
Energy efficiency plans should lead to improve life situation directly and concrete advantages.
Undoubtedly, one of the methods of increasing efficiency in cities is using public transport. Encouraging people for less use of private car is followed by reducing energy consumption, visual and audio pollution, traffic, mortality, losses due to accidents.
One of the successful instances in this area is the city of Curitiba in Brazil. It founded public transport system, the first of its kind in the world, by giving loans from the World Bank in 1970s for development of public transport and creating BRT.
It is obvious that efficiency improvement in cities confronts with limitations and obstacles. Lack of municipality budget for devoting loan in order to increase energy efficiency, application of modern technologies, difficulty of financing these technologies in general, and limited power of local governments for policy-making are some of the barriers in energy domain.
Financing is one of the most important challenges for many cities. Cities are obliged to borrow from central government. More than 70 percent of our country’s population lives in the cities. City management should improve efficiency in cities since it is possible to achieve resistance economy through this path.
Source: Farhikhtegan Newspaper
Date : April 23, 2016
