City-zen crossed interviews : Atos and Siemens

Siemens Nederland NV

Louis Bekker

ATOS Worldgrid

Jean-Louis Deimerly

Why are you part of the project ?

Siemens is industrial partner in the project since innovative technologies are major levers for sustainable city development. Effective infrastructure contributes to economic prosperity and an improved quality of live. The complexity involved requires a holistic view, sustainable and smart solutions and cooperation with the City and its partners.

In the following of the Linky smart metering project delivered to ERDF in 2011, the internal R&D budget allowed to initiate the development of cutting edge IT products and technologies in the Grenoble entity of AWG, to address emerging challenges that we observed in the distribution area.
In the frame of smart grids, Greenlys (2012, funded by ADEME), and then Ecocité (2013, funded by la Caisse des Dépots), have been the two R&D collaborative projects launched at local level, which contributed Atos to reach the critical expertise in the grid prescriptive operation and maintenance.
In late 2012, the invitation of the Municipality of Grenoble to participate and submit a proposal for City-zen in our area of expertise, was an honor and a recognition which perfectly fitted with our strategy to develop and diversify our solution portfolio, not only for utilities but also to satisfy needs of administrations, municipalities and real estate stakeholders, that we see blooming in many areas of today’s world.

What are your activities in the project and what results are you aiming for ?

Siemens will design a future driven interoperable system (City Dashboard) for a sustainable city residence area in Amsterdam and this dashboard will be part of the Smart Grid demonstration in cooperation with Alliander. This system will give an overview of the Key performance indicators (KPI’s) of sustainability within a city residential area. Based on the results of the KPI’s, scenario’s will be available for an overall urban control of energy, climate and other factors that influence sustainability and the quality of living within the urban area. The quality of live is an important factor to make a certain urban area more attractive for residents to live in.

In the frame of a previous project, we already had a partnership in force with the utility of Grenoble, GEG. For CityZen, Atos and GEG extended this partnership to work together and use the outstanding opportunity of this project to submit our design and implementation to GEG’s application, operation and feedback, in providing:
•    A smart-grid system realized for the demonstration site of Grenoble, consisting in a future- oriented smart management and control system, integrating all existing energy flows of the experimentation area.
•    The unique multi-energy solution allows considering interoperable control operation, supporting future energy infrastructure.
•    Characteristics: multi fluid / multi energy ; development of a territorial dashboard ; designed according to a multi-geographies levels ; connected to the existing generation units ; electrical vehicles and renewables incorporated ; built on top of an existing electrical grid.

What’s make the project innovative ?

Open urban data, measurement, monitoring, trend analyzing and real-time control with scenarios leads to the next thing in the development of city intelligence (“City with brains”).

Each of these standalone functionalities has already been demonstrated.
The combination of the above listed characteristics, meeting the interest of many city stakeholders makes the project innovative. Moreover, the integration of these functions in a single system opens a field of services that is still to be investigated and exceeds by far the initial target of energy management.

What are the impacts of your solutions on citizens’ daily lives ?

A City dashboard will on daily base supply local authorities and citizens’ knowledge about what’s exactly happening in the environment of their city and their lives.
Real-time knowledge is an important drive to have the wish of citizens to change their way of living, particular to make it better.
Use of scenario’s will lead on short notices to more efficient use of energy, to a better air quality and to an improvement of livability of citizens.
A City Dashboard leads to a better managed environment, a higher quality of livability in the city and a higher living standard for the citizens.

One of the drivers of our project is to provide the citizens with their relevant data (consumption, recommendations), at personal, building and district levels.  Such information is the necessary (but not sufficient) base for suggesting adapting the audience behaviors, on the way to improve global city’s as well as individual’s quality of life.

What does “new urban energy” mean for you ?

Every week, the number of people living in urban centers grows by around one million. Some cities already have higher populations than countries like Austria, Israel, Chile or Cambodia. Cities are engines for growth, employment and prosperity, and currently account for roughly 80 percent of global economic output. Cities already account for some two-thirds of global energy consumption, and are responsible for up to 70 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Technology will reduce energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. The intelligent integration of lighting, data, HVAC and security systems, for instance, can lower the high energy consumption of buildings by as much as 40 percent. For Siemens, this means that climate protection is good for people, for our planet and for business.

“New urban energy” stands as the marketed name for services allowing “new urban citizens” to select their energy consumption, according to optimized tariffs, available energy sources and nature and other technical and legal constraints. Together with authorities, energy distribution utilities but also industrial firms, we are proud to contribute in the design the most appropriate system and conditions of use to reach this purpose.