From Scotland to Sweden: How smart cities help residents save energy
The university city of Umeå, in northern Sweden, is almost completely dark in winter. Encouraging residents to take public transit on cold, gloomy mornings takes some persuasion, but the city is more perceptive than most about the needs of the people who live there.
After decades of applying a gender-based lens to its travel research, the city knows that if everyone traveled as women, it would already have reached its 2050 sustainable transport goal.
A bus stop was built with individual wooden skis to help women feel safer in public spaces.
– It started a big discussion in Umeå, says project manager Carina Aschan about Station of Being, which uses distinctive sounds and colored lights to announce incoming electric buses.
“It was supposed to be an energy solution, but it also became a social solution and sparked a wider discussion about Umeå being innovative and whether a city should do it.”
Dozens of smart solutions have been launched under an EU-funded project called RUGGEDISED, which aims to reduce carbon emissions in three cities and inspire many more. As it comes to an end after six years, the question of what our cities can do for us, energy wise, has become more urgent than ever.
Here are some of the brightest finds from the “light cities” in Umeå, Rotterdam and Glasgow.
What are smart cities?
Smart cities sounds futuristic but is based on a few simple ideas about digitizing our transport, buildings and other infrastructure. One way to think about smart solutions is to work better with what already exists.
In Rotterdam’s Heart of South experimental area, the heat from waste water (which reaches up to 19C) will be recovered via a heat exchanger and stored in the thermal network. Nearby, pipes have been laid under the pavement to extract its heat (the concrete reaches 65C in summer). In winter, warm water instead of cold will be pumped through them to melt the icy walkway.
There is nothing flashy about this innovation, hidden underground and at the back of the city’s Ahoy Convention Center.
But it’s about results, and Ahoy has been fossil-free since 2019. A carpet of thousands of solar panels on the roof supplies the colossal energy needed for huge light shows, such as Eurovision 2021.
Switching Rotterdam into a smart city
“My dream is to have the built environment connected to sustainable energy sources,” Katelien van den Berge, Rotterdam’s RUGGEDISED project manager, told Euronews Green.
The NetherlandsThe second city was razed by German bombers during World War II, so its eclectic architecture has relatively recent roots.
“We have an advantage because we have quite spacious public spaces,” explains van den Berge, which makes it easier to weave smarter infrastructure under roads and into the fabric of the city.
“We rebuilt Rotterdam after WWII, we had an empty inner city, everything was flattened and they built one district heating system, she says. “The ownership changed and the sources changed, but the system was already there, so it makes it easier to expand.” Around 11,000 homes are already connected.
How smart solutions reduce energy demand
Knowing more about how energy flows through our cities also enables us to be more efficient in our use of it. Umeå’s most effective solution has been better management of demand, says Aschan.
An intelligent array of sensors was installed in its university buildings, collecting data on human presence, temperature, light and CO2 levels. A smarter heating and cooling system followed that has achieved a 23 percent reduction in energy use during peak hours across campus.
The city’s university adjoins the hospital, and RUGGEDISED has sparked conversations between the two. Instead of building a new wing, the hospital realized it can use some of the empty university rooms at night. It may seem simple but using what is already in one smarter way is what is needed in most cases.
Smarter ways to use energy at home
The number one place many city dwellers desperately need to save energy this winter is at home.
This is not equally true across the continent. In Sweden, tenants have the right to a heated home and there is no phrase for “fuel poverty‘ (or hot banks). In the UK – despite Prime Minister Truss freeze bills of an average of €2,890 a year – 7 million households are still on track to spend more than 10 percent of their income on fuel.
To ease the burden on some of the poorest residents, Glasgow City Council has partnered with Wheatley, Scotland’s largest social housing group. Through RUGGEDISED, new devices have been installed on tenants‘ electric storage heating systems, giving them greater control over the temperature in their apartments.
People use about 20 percent less Electricity as a result, explains Wheatley’s carbon reduction and sustainability manager Colin Reid.
“It allows us to interact with households, it gives them for the first time the possibility to control the heating in their own home when before they were just receivers,” he says.
“It’s a courtesy to people that they can see for themselves how their home works.”
Glasgow’s smart street
It is often said that people do Glasgow and “people make Glasgow greener” has become another call to action.
“It’s part of the character of the city,” says Reid. “It has its problems and has a legacy of industrialisation, but on the whole Glasgow is a warm place. People want community with each other, so it’s a real asset when they embark on a just transition.”
Running through the heart of the city – along a stretch of George Street and Duke Street – is Glasgow’s flagship solution: it’s smart street.
Here, the council has tried a series of measures, including lighting that is triggered when people pass by, a new solar cover on the roof of the car park to charge E.Vs plus power storageand district heating.
When the world’s leaders descend on your city for POLICE, decision-makers tend to take more notice, says Gavin Slater, head of sustainability at Glasgow City Council. Still, “the city is a fundamentally better place” because of its participation in RUGGEDISED, he says.
Glasgow has made great progress towards its net-zero goal by 2030, Slater revealed. Carbon dioxide emissions have already decreased 50 percent since 2006.
Digital twins: How far can model data help cities become greener?
Data is rapidly changing the way we see our homes and streets, from a energy saving point of view. Where there used to be one data point a year – someone will come to check yours gas and electrical – our homes are now a hive of numbers, notes Dr Marcel van Oosterhout from the Erasmus Center for Data Analytics.
Of course, public concern about how this data is used slows its potential. The risk depends on how detailed an image can end up in the wrong hands. Data on energy use could be combined with addresses, giving a fairly clear indication of when people are on holiday.
But representatives from all three cities spoke glowingly of what “digital twins” can do for sustainable planning. These are smart 3D models of the city that are combined with real-time data about how it works, explains Roland van der Heijden, Program Manager for Digital City Rotterdam.
They make it possible for the residents to be included in the planning as well. At the site of a new plaza, people can scan a QR code to create and rate designs, then use augmented reality to see what they will look like.
Generic, scalable, maintainable data sources are key, adds van der Heijden. And this is where the private sector can have a big role to play. Google is leveraging vast data reserves to build its Environmental Insights (EIE) tool to capture transport emissions, air quality and tree canopy.
Anna Williams, a solutions leader in the tech giant’s Geo team, insists that “helping cities lower their emissions is our north star.”
What are the limits to smart cities?
“There is no ‘cookie cutter copy’ for building smart cities,” says Adriaan Slob, an expert at the Dutch research organization TNO that has helped cities with their sustainable transitions.
A major challenge is that these smart solutions must be implemented in existing urban areas, with their own messy networks.
In the heart of the south, Katelien van den Berge’s team could not get smart power grid from the ground. Although there are all the elements of smart lighting, electric vehicles and charging points, the city did not get the experimental status it needed to connect them, and a key contract bid from energy partner Eneco was awarded elsewhere.
“There was no coordination between city-scale tendering and project-level implementation,” reflects van den Berge. And with no overall owner, there was no one to take responsibility for the network’s success. Regardless in such a restless city as Rotterdam; the team is taking its lessons to a number of other major urban development areas.
Where ambition has outdone itself, RUGGEDISED still delivers some striking blueprints. But it’s clear that smarter connectivity is needed at a higher regulatory level as well.
Regarding energy crisis overall civic life – at least in Glasgow and Rotterdam – van den Berge believes “there can only be a way up. I think this winter will be the bottom, and then we start working on how to tackle it.”