Image: 4green
Written by Alkiviadis Tzioras, software engineer at Wattcrop.
In a smart city, all essential services such as energy, water, transport, public health and safety are managed in a coordinated way to support the smooth functioning of critical infrastructure, while providing a stable and safe, affordable environment to live and work in.
The most important infrastructure in any city is energy and its efficient management. If there is no energy available, all city operations come to a halt.
A smart grid is the heart of a smart city. Three things a smart grid should do. First, it must be able to inform consumers about their energy consumption and provide information on energy savings. Second, it should control, monitor and remotely coordinate the operation of the network. Thirdly, to integrate different energy sources into the network in a safe and reliable way.
Let’s look at an example of how efficient grid utilisation can be achieved in a smart city: Water utilities are usually one of the largest energy consumers in a city. The use of pumping stations for pumping water is a critical and energy-intensive process. But is there a way to achieve a reduction in electricity consumption during peak hours, when energy is more expensive? The answer is yes, with the smart grid it would be possible to change the process of pumping water by shifting it to off-peak hours. The water company can reduce energy consumption, helping to avoid problems (network overload) and allow other more critical and less flexible operations (such as hospitals) to maintain uninterrupted supplies. In the same vein, building owners and the public will be able to participate in energy saving schemes. The smart grid will distribute load in a more predictable and manageable way, so that the city’s critical infrastructure (including police, fire, hospitals) can operate uninterrupted.
Needless to say, these capabilities do not exist in their entirety anywhere in the world, yet. But there are significant existing applications and initiatives underway in many cities and utilities to make their infrastructures compatible with the standards set for the use of the smart grid over the next decade.
In fact, much of the technology already exists to take the first steps. Significant automation, communications and information technology models are already being implemented in the power distribution systems of many utilities to improve their reliability. There is a clear move toward introducing more intelligence into substations to make faster decisions about isolation, fault detection and restoration, as well as in voltage and reactive power management. At the same time, the increasing penetration of renewable energy sources implies new needs for the management of protection equipment and the upgrading of new substations to be built.
The result is the ability to control the power supply network, where advanced logging and analysis capabilities can be applied by control centres to better manage the growing “fleet” of intelligent agents. In addition, the integration of variables from intelligent agents contributes to the balanced use and management of distributed power generation resources in the supply network. This provides an important incentive for the participation of residential, commercial and industrial segments of cities and communities in energy conservation, efficiency and demand response programs. Home and building automation systems have become an integral part of this movement, which will continue to grow. Advanced metering infrastructure, meter data management systems, and advanced data analytics will gather, evaluate, and produce information to improve forecasting, determine load response, and improve operational decision making. All of this is directly intertwined with the concept of smart grids enabling the development of smart cities whose other functions continue to evolve in parallel. The technology base supporting the development of the infrastructure within a smart city, buildings, industry and domestic consumers, continues to move towards more automated and intelligent platforms.
Smart cities, like the smart grid, will evolve slowly but surely over the next two decades. The information generated by the ecosystem of a smart city will be better exploited and shared between services, infrastructure operators and citizens. Cities will work with suppliers to create integrated solutions and the smart grid will become just one part of a wider, more flexible urban ecosystem.
Ultimately, we will all contribute to the evolution of a smart city, because we will all be part of a smart city.