A low-emission zone should not be understood simply as an access-restricted area. Its impact extends to mobility, urban planning, air quality, and increasingly, the energy system. The electrification of transport and heating and cooling means that decisions that were once made separately are now closely interconnected.
Planning requires an integrated perspective. Traffic, land use, charging points, buildings, heat pumps, distributed generation, energy storage and grid capacity must all be analyzed using a common data foundation. Urban digital twins and numerical models make it possible to simulate scenarios, anticipate congestion and demand peaks, and assess whether a city can maintain its expected service levels before making investments.
The transition to electric heating and cooling adds another important dimension. Replacing conventional thermal generation with electric heat pumps can improve efficiency, but it also shifts demand towards the electricity grid. The opportunity lies in managing this consumption flexibly: preheating or precooling buildings, making use of thermal inertia, combining energy storage with self-consumption, and shifting consumption to periods when energy availability is higher or grid congestion is lower. This flexibility can also contribute to demand response mechanisms and local energy markets, where permitted by the regulatory framework.
The same applies to electric mobility. Installing charging stations is not enough: Sufficient energy and power must be available at the right locations and times. Charging needs to be coordinated with other urban consumption, avoiding a situation where traffic peaks simply translate into electricity demand peaks.
Data and AI make it possible to turn these interdependencies into measurable decisions. Mobility, accessibility, air quality, energy consumption, peak demand, supply continuity, and service quality indicators should be assessed together, both within and beyond the areas where interventions are implemented.
Technology, however, cannot replace public policy. These transformations require stable objectives, transparent metrics, and planning frameworks that can remain in place beyond a single political term, supported by regular reviews based on evidence and results.
The real challenge is not to manage a low-emission zone, an electricity grid, or a building separately. It is to understand the city as a single system and optimise it as such.
By Miguel Ángel Rodríguez López
Subject Matter Expert, SDG Group Spain