The idea of the PED concept is to find a common methodology on EU level for assessing districts on their way to a more sustainable energy system. To promote the concept and to draw attention to the energy system transformation in districts, the EU set the goal to establish 100 PEDs until 2025. All PED projects are collected in one common database (https://peddatabase.dutpartnership.eu/). JPI Urban Europe set up three principles that a PED should follow. These principles are:
1. • Energy flexibility: Active contribution to the balancing and resilience of the surrounding energy system.
2. • Energy efficiency: Reduction of energy consumption and connection of various stakeholders.
3. • Energy production: Generation of renewable energy locally with regards to local conditions.
Still, there is no common definition of what a PED exactly is, but it is often referred to as a district that has a positive (primary) energy balance, meaning that more energy is produced locally than used over one year. As this is especially hard to achieve for urban districts with high energy demand and low potential for renewables, the focus is now shifting from positive energy balance to positive impact. Fraunhofer ISE contributed to this discussion with their paper on PED definitions and assessment methods (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.segy.2024.100147). The assessment method should give a metric to evaluate if a district has reached PED status or not. Based on the definition of a positive energy balance, the assessment method is straightforward. Starting from that, many institutions have implemented assessment methods that refine the concept of a sole positive energy balance to include the boundary conditions of different district types, climate zones, etc. One way is to establish a method based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), which should ensure that the JPI principles and other important PED assessment factors are sufficiently included. We decided that a set of KPIs is a good method to include different perspectives in one assessment method and that there is room for adding more indicators later or for including other perspectives apart from energy use, generation, and storage, which are the core of the assessment method presented in this dashboard. A detailed description of the method can be found on the subpage KPI Assessment.
Ped Database: https