December 15, 2023
Efficacity and Aire Nouvelle are partnering to promote low-carbon urban planning
On Tuesday, December 12, during the SIMI trade show, Michel Salem-Sermanet, CEO of Efficacity, an R&D institute focused on the energy and ecological transition of cities, and Ludovic Mouly, the new CEO of Aire Nouvelle, a subsidiary of Equans France, renewed their partnership focused on the design of low-carbon neighborhoods for a period of three years.
Aire Nouvelle will collaborate with Efficacity to create innovative solutions and increasingly powerful software tools to measure and reduce the carbon and environmental impact of projects. The two partners will rely in particular on the “Quartier Energie Carbone” method promoted by ADEME and its application tool, UrbanPrint. More broadly, the partnership will support the R&D institute in developing key software tools to aid in the design of low-carbon neighborhoods: EnergyMapper, PowerDIS, and UrbanPrint.
Accelerating the transition to neighborhoods with a low environmental impact
Having already experienced the added value of Efficacity’s software for designing low-carbon neighborhoods in projects such as the “Cathédrales du rail” (Saint-Denis, 93) and “Auxerre Ambitieuse”—on which Aire Nouvelle and Efficacity collaborated— the subsidiary of Equans France will continue to benefit from privileged access to the institute’s three main software programs as a beta tester. This initiative serves a dual purpose: to build expertise and gather feedback to improve the tools:
- EnergyMapper: this software provides a comprehensive identification of a region’s energy resources (solar thermal and photovoltaic, geothermal, biomass, biogas, urban and industrial waste heat, etc.), providing a map of available sources as well as a technical, economic, and environmental analysis of their utilization.
- PowerDIS: This dynamic energy simulation software at the neighborhood scale enables users to select the best energy strategy (renovation, replacement of energy systems, changes in usage and control, connection to grids, etc.) by simulating energy consumption and production, as well as by comparing different multi-energy scenarios—centralized, decentralized, or hybrid.
- UrbanPrint: this software, already tested on the “Cathédrales du rail” project, assesses the environmental impacts—using life cycle assessment (LCA)—of all components of an urban development or renovation project: energy consumption, construction materials for buildings and outdoor spaces, water and waste management, daily mobility, land-use changes and carbon sequestration, construction phase…
As a founding member and regular partner of Efficacity, Aire Nouvelle is renewing its commitment—as a subsidiary of Equans France—to actively participate in the continuous improvement of tools that support the design of low-carbon neighborhoods. Driven by a strong environmental vision, embodied by the AN Compass and its four pillars—energy, mobility, biodiversity, and materials —Aire Nouvelle also helps lead the ENR&R Booster, another initiative promoting sustainable urban development, launched at SIBCA.
“The year 2023 marks an acceleration in the nationwide dissemination of carbon assessments for development projects in the design phase, an essential step toward reducing the carbon footprint of the urban planning sector, as rightly recommended by the May 2023 ministerial roadmap on decarbonizing urban planning. More recently, the Senate report “Engaging in and Succeeding at Your Community’s Environmental Transition,” published last November, recommends that all development projects be designed with their carbon impact in mind, using the Quartier Energie Carbone method promoted by ADEME. UrbanPrint is the software that implements this method, and we are very pleased that Aire Nouvelle is one of the very first “ambassador developers” for UrbanPrint. “We hope that many public and private developers will quickly follow its example,” said Michel Salem-Sermanet, CEO of Efficacity.
“ “We would like to thank Efficacity for the relationship of trust we have built over the past few years, which allows us to address the challenges of tomorrow’s cities with ever greater precision and comprehensiveness, through a systemic approach that takes into account all the components and interactions of neighborhoods and cities (energy, materials, waste, mobility…) and keeping pace with changing patterns of use. It is notably this same partnership-based approach that has enabled us, alongside developers Cirrus and Nexity, to develop Occitanie’s first major commercial project (Montpellier) with a wood-frame structure, powered by renewable energy sources accounting for over 45% of its energy needs, thanks to the urban utility networks in the Cambacérès neighborhood,” concludes Ludovic Mouly, CEO of Aire Nouvelle, Equans France’s low-carbon urban development and real estate development subsidiary.
