Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Ruggedised (Rotterdam, Umea and Glasgow: Generating Exemplar Districts In Sustainable Energy Deployment)

Teaser

RUGGEDISED will create urban spaces powered by secure, affordable and clean energy, smart electro-mobility, and smart tools and services. It will showcase economic viability to significantly increase cities\' overall energy and resource efficiency through actions addressing the...

Summary

RUGGEDISED will create urban spaces powered by secure, affordable and clean energy, smart electro-mobility, and smart tools and services. It will showcase economic viability to significantly increase cities\' overall energy and resource efficiency through actions addressing the energy systems, mobility, climate change, water and air quality.

The lighthouse cities (LHCs) in the project are Rotterdam (the Netherlands), Glasgow (Scotland/United Kingdom) and Umeå (Sweden). The fellow cities, Brno (Czech Republic), Parma (Italy) and Gdansk (Poland), will develop replication plans based on the LHCs’ smart solutions.

The project will provide impacts related to replicability, socio-economics, environment, market transformation and policy.

Replicability: Each LHC has partners from the ‘triple helix’ on board to ensure that good experiences are generated in the lighthouse districts will be up-scaled to other parts of the city, region or country. The fellow cities will have defined concrete plans for replication of solutions by the end of the project.

Socio-economics: The outcomes of the project will benefit directly more than 200,000 citizens from a total of 1.3 million residents in the cities. It is estimated that the implementation of the project mobilizes investments of about 1 billion EUR and a total of >1,900 new jobs. The project aims to have a significant impact on the energy cost for citizens and to address energy poverty. Environment: The LHCs will increase the energy efficiency on district level by 20 to 60% depending on the specific case.

Work performed

Innovation
To provide a learning and exchange platform between LHCs, three Liaison groups on “hardware”, “software” and “orgware” were established and several intensive workshops took place to discuss pressing issues and challenges between practitioners and experts.

Lighthouses

In Rotterdam, the developments of the smart solutions of RUGGEDISED follow the developments of the area development in the Heart of South. A smart thermal grid has been designed to grow. At this moment the business case for the smart thermal grid is known in detail. Significant progress have been done on the dynamic route-planning software to optimize routes of the electric busses, the development of the data and ICT solutions, among others.

Umeå has set up a tight coordination and management structure and have also successfully established a Smart City governance group. All solutions, (except one) have started according to plan and are now in the implementation stage. A success story, which goes beyond the planned progress, consist of the new cooperation models, e.g. the business model for green parking, which now has been rolled out throughout the city. It will reduce the CO2-emissions from traffic by involving estate owners and the citizens.

Glasgow City Council has managed to establish a strong governance model to underpin the project, as well as establishing a political lead to champion the project. Significant advances have been made on modelling, rollout of EV charging infrastructure, and the back-end architecture of the data based decision platform.

Upscaling
Within the upscaling Work Package, a baseline for the research tasks has been established. Workshops have been held in the LHC’s to start the scenario and CCC analysis. Initial meetings and workshops have also been held in the cities to start to understand the baseline condition of internal collaboration structures in the LHC’s, to which the Innovation platforms will be built on.

Replication
The Fellow Cities have all established effective local governance groups that show a strong commitment in carrying on and steering smart city’s activities and initiatives. In all cases, they have been set up and structured in such a way as to survive the numerous political elections.
Concerning the long-term strategy and planning, all Fellow cities have just started a participatory foresight process aimed at defining a medium-long term vision.
As for the actual replication activities, the three cities are in different stages: in Brno, the district where the smart solutions will be applied has been identified. Gdansk and Parma have already identified a list of solutions to replicate as well as the implementation sites. The specific events foreseen in WP7 will contribute to enforce the replication process by giving opportunities to cities to gather knowledge and share expertise and experiences.

Dissemination and communication
Communication channels have been set in place. The content includes news, blog posts, interviews and an animated video. Extensive collaboration with the other SCC1 projects has been sought. Media activity both started from the beginning of the project. Capacity building activities have also started with two policy sessions during the European Sustainable Energy weeks in the past two years

Final results

RUGGEDISED project will provide significant impacts in the following areas: Replicability, Socio-economics, Environment, Market Transformation and Policy. The main expected impact from the Lighthouses and Fellow cities are as following:

At the end of the project, Rotterdam aims to connect all buildings to the thermal and to the electrical grid and to have all energy data from these grids, and also data from the other solutions, managed by the Central Energy and Data Management System and visualized in the 3D City model of Rotterdam.

An expected result in Umeå is a Letter of Memorandum to confirm the cooperation leading to the continue reduction of CO2-reduction, including the action plan for the development toward the 100% renewable energy supply. The work with the ICT-solutions have resulted in the discovery of new and innovative uses of the demand side management system, for example safety and facility service. New discoveries regarding the energy optimization of the electric buses of Umeå, have resulted in the design of a smart real-time information at the new BRT-bus stop.

Glasgow expects, by the end of the project, to be able to demonstrate effective measures that will relieve pressure on existing infrastructure by controlling the impact of increasing electrification of transport; increase the availability of EV charging infrastructure for those working and living within the project district; alleviate from fuel poverty for residents in the district through the use of battery technology and renewable energy connected to a smart grid system; and develop a data based decision platform that will enhance decision making in the city from both bottom up and top down approaches and be demonstrated through use-cases.

For the Fellow cities, the objective is to create capacity and generate knowledge in and for the LHC’s to enable upscaling of the smart solutions in the demo WP’s. By mid-term of the project, most of the analytical tasks will be completed, after which the integration of knowledge into the Innovation Platforms will intensify. By the end of the project, the ambition is to have formed an innovative organisational capacity in order to implement smart solution schemes in a city scale.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.ruggedised.eu/.