So, how does a utility take full advantage of that growing market—and its growing demands—over that next decade of explosive growth?
Step one: big vision
First, define what a smart city is for your utility. It should be efficient, modern, automated, secure, connected, informed and responsive, according to Ron Pate, vice president of Smart Grid Solutions at Elster during the recent Elster-sponsored Intelligent Utility webcast “Preparing for the next big convergence: smart grids and smart cities.”
“Technology will be one of the key enablers of the smart city,” Pate noted during the presentation.
“Those technology indicators will be complimented on the customer side by a smart city that is more connected, a population that is more informed and a utility that is more responsive,” added Larry Owens, senior division manager of customer services and marketing at Silicon Valley Power (SVP), who also spoke on the recent webcast. (SVP is the City of Santa Clara’s municipal utility with some customers among the who’s who of high tech.)
Step two: happy, heard stakeholders
After defining a vision for the smart city, Pate advised that step two is garnering stakeholder support for the vision from everyone in the process—from utility insiders to community activists.
Owens offered insider insight into how SVP is preparing for the smart city future with both tech advances and stakeholder communication. They started with a vision they label Smart3, which postulates that smart metering plus a smart grid leads to a smart city.
“Smart metering, however, is only one starting point that a city might have,” Pate added, noting that different stakeholders in the process will come from different starting points. What a utility as to keep in mind is that all of the stakeholders in the process, including themselves, have a common end goal in the smart city vision—or a holistic “smart community,” as Pate labeled the thinking.
Pate estimated that approximately 50 percent of smart cities would start off with a metering infrastructure, though some may start off in tangential areas such as communications networks for smart lighting. Wherever a utility starts, however, bringing to light the benefits to all stakeholders in the process can help all disparate players in the vision come together.
Step three: tech solutions
Once you’ve defined your utility’s smart city vision and brought in the community and company stakeholders, it’s now time to discuss the technology side of the smart city equation.
“The bottom line on smart cities is that they are intelligent, energy-efficient communities enabled by advanced architectural solutions,” Pate said. Those advanced solutions are an amalgamation, really, of innovative, diverse, integrated and interoperable devices in the vision that Pate and Owens laid out in the webcast. And the devices on the short list of smart city enablers include sensing devices, communications technology, information systems and data-driven applications.
“Sensing devices will be the eyes and ears of the smart city, and you need to plan for that up front—thinking about the pervasiveness of these devices,” Pate advised.
“Elster and SVP are really of the same mind with this vision,” Owens added. “We see all of this coming up in conversations with city planning and stakeholder context.”
Step four: returning to the big vision every day
In the end, Pate and Owens advise pulling back to “higher level planning” and rooting out maximum value with each new technology step—and not to get bogged down in the tech details. Keep with the vision.
“Energy is a natural starting point, as it will power the grid of the future,” Pate noted. But, the smart city technology of the next evolving decade will cross over through energy, transport, health and security.
As insiders in the energy industry, utilities know about those smart city factors: smart meters, intelligent networks, renewable energy, lighting control, water and gas management and energy storage. Pate and Owens, however, suggest also looking at how those energy technologies you’re focused on touch the other three areas. How does energy intersect with traffic control and coordination, multi-vehicle tickets, intelligent parking and electric vehicles under transport? How does energy impact data exchange, eHealth and remote health monitoring? How does it factor into public safety, monitoring systems, biometric identification and integrated sensors for security?
Understanding those connections is key to developing the most efficient smart city vision.
“I encourage you to think in unified network layers,” Pate advised. “Multiple layered architecture and multipurpose networks will be the reality of the future.”
That layered architecture will create an evolution in multi-network devices. So, the networks of the future will have layers in architecture and devices, along with advance, multi-dimensional interoperability, all while serving more than one purpose under more than one vertical in the smart city scheme.
“There’s a microcosm of multi-dimensional interoperability happening with the utility industry—with my utility—right now,” Owens said. “The devices and the applications connect through a ubiquitous, multipurpose communication networks. And that’s a vision we saw early on with the metering deployment and discussions about how we could control the utility of the future.”
This article originally appeared on Intelligent Utility and was republished here with permission.
