Creating Cities of the Future with Digital Twin Technology
Clean Air Act was to establish a federal
program to research into techniques for
monitoring and controlling air pollution.
Significantly enhanced by a series of
subsequent amendments, the Clean Air Act
evolved from monitoring and controlling to
limiting sources of pollution by setting air
quality
standards
and
thorough
enforcement actions.
earth, changing weather patterns and
shortening lives.
In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change 7 sparked an impassioned
international conversation on the urgent
need to address climate-change risks to our
environment. As a result, cities around the
world are seeking to decarbonize their
energy systems as quickly as possible. Swift
adoption of renewable energy, however, can
have unintended consequences. Without a
measured approach to the potential
network impacts of distributed energy
resources (DERs), some early adopters have
experienced a number of issues related to
the reliability and power quality of
renewables.
Despite technology advancements in auto
emissions, regulations and policies intended
to drive compliance, poor air quality
continues to affect almost every aspect of
our health, from decreased lung capacity in
children 2 to inflammatory skin conditions 3
and even physical changes in facial features
such as thickening of the skin around the
mouth and nose. 4
For example, the amount of energy that can
be produced via solar depends on weather
conditions and time of day. With this type of
variation, the amount of power from
renewable sources that enters the electricity
grid fluctuates. Since most rooftop solar
Photovoltaics (PV) generation is not visible
to power grid control rooms, this variation in
power production leads to load forecasting
errors which, in turn, require additional
generation reserves to cover the load
Fossil fuel-based energy generation is a
major source of air pollution in many
communities.
The
World
Health
Organization has linked emissions from fossil
fuel with 43% of lung cancer deaths and 25%
of heart disease deaths. 5 The deleterious
effects of air pollution are not limited to our
skin, our hearts and our lungs. Air pollution
and other byproducts of our continued
reliance on fossil fuels 6 is also warming the
2 US National Library of Medicine. March 24 2005. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15356303
3 US National Library of Medicine Dec 29 2015. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5916788/
4 ResearchGate. May 2014. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266850972_Air_Pollution_and_the_skin
5
World Economic Forum. June 5 2019. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/06/10-facts-about-air-pollution-on-world-
environment-day
6
Pacific Standard. Apr 17 2019. https://psmag.com/environment/air-pollution-is-killing-more-people-than-smoking-and-fossil-
fuels-are-largely-to-blame
7
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Oct 2018. https://report.ipcc.ch/sr15/pdf/sr15_spm_final.pdf
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