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Published in July, the Smart Cities and Communities European Innovation Partnership (SCC) is a partnership across the areas of energy, transport, information and communication with the objective to advance solutions in areas where energy production, distribution and use; mobility and transport; and information and communication technologies are linked and offer opportunities for reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. SCC is a follow up of the Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET Plan) and the European Initiative on Smart Cities of the SET Plan.
The objectives of the SCC will be by 2020 to demonstrate and scale up at least 20 major innovative solutions that combine energy, transport and ICT technologies and enable pioneering cities to outperform in terms of achieving the EU targets for reducing carbon emissions, use of renewable energy sources, and for increasing energy efficiency
These objectives will be reached by Lighthouse projects that will tackle solutions at the intersection of the transport, energy and ICT sectors.
Lighthouse projects should offer solutions to the broad range of geographical, spatial and demographic characteristics of European cities. They should encompass (1) a project design phase where different building blocks would be selected; (2) an integration phase where these would be combined, and in many cases also integrated with legacy infrastructure and systems, for demonstration and validation at a scale that is sufficient to enable systemic change in applications which are not yet commercial, (3) a review phase to assess performance and transferability.
Examples and areas for Lighthouse projects include:
Smart buildings and neighbourhoods: integration and management of local and renewable energy sources; ICT solutions, for design as well as operation of urban districts or corridors with different building, nearly zero-energy buildings and positive energy buildings and neighbourhoods; deep retrofitting of existing buildings and sustainable building materials.
Smart supply and demand systems and services for better-informed citizens: provision of data and information to citizens and end-users on energy consumption/production and multimodal transport and mobility services; waste generation, smart metering and related services for energy, water, waste; monitoring and balancing the grid.
Sustainable urban mobility: energy and fuelling infrastructure and the operation of vehicle fleets powered by alternative energy carriers for public transport, freight distribution, alternative transport options and private transport using ICT-based solutions for urban traffic and transport management supporting the reduction of energy consumption and emissions.
Smart and sustainable digital infrastructures: reducing the carbon footprint of the Internet, in particular data centres and telecommunications equipment, including broadband; intelligent heating, cooling and lighting solutions; exploitation of synergies between requirements for smart grids and broadband infrastructure including sharing engineering works and reusing infrastructures and services.
Strategic planning for identification, integration and optimisation of flows: optimisation of different energy, transport and data flows; traffic management using information systems; logistics; development of green infrastructure and use of smart ICT to manage it; optimised waste collection and energy generation; business models; open data platforms including semantics and data sharing.
Involved industry led consortia are expected to be strongly committed to the use of open standards to facilitate interoperability across systems and to making all relevant data accessible and as widely available as possible.
Download the Communication: SMART CITIES AND COMMUNITIES – EUROPEAN INNOVATION PARTNERSHIP
Source: Smart Cities and Communities EIP