Future cities are here right now

Thomas O’Reilly responds to Utility Week’s recent Future Cities feature with insight into the progress of funding, integration and rollout of programmes in this important area.

On 6 February Utility Week published a special feature that explored the evolution of future cities and asked industry experts for their views on the role of utilities in these emerging urban megaliths. This was an important and timely article given recent United Nations data showing that the population of the world’s cities is growing at a rate of two people per second. Projections now show that in 2050, the number of people living in cities will be almost as large as the world’s entire population today.

In short, this means that cities will have to become smarter. Clean and efficient technologies provide one of the main enablers of this transition and, it is becoming increasingly clear, the value that can be extracted from their deployment is at the point where these technologies integrate.

Discussing the current state of future cities projects in the UK in the aforementioned article, Juan Bejar, chief executive of FCC wrote: “So far, these programmes have been characterised by fragmented schemes, establishing demonstration projects working in isolation.”
I for one could not agree more. The current state of affairs in future cities is portrayed by disparate, unconnected pilots exhibiting a single, or few, technological sub-segments. Utilities, in the main, have been conspicuous by their absence in such demonstration projects.

One way in which the European Union has been trying to accelerate these isolated and fragmented schemes is through the Horizon 2020 Smart Cities Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. With a budget of €92 million (£66 million) last year, this ambitious project aims to showcase large-scale interconnected future city demonstrator use cases, covering multiple market verticals and product solutions.

The project, of which Siemens is a part, is called Triangulum and includes seven cities (Manchester, Stavanger, Eindhoven, Prague, Sabadell, Leipzig and Tianjin). These cities all have a common city level ICT (information and communications technology) architecture covering distributed energy management, traffic management, electric vehicle integration, building device integration, water and wastewater organisation and smart parking software.

 “The most profound and immediate change in this market will come in the way a city or local authority takes ownership of its distributed generation assets, how they are managed and how they can be leveraged to provide a better quality of energy service to citizens.”

The granularity surrounding what these future city sub-segments are and how they interconnect has been too vague for too long. As John Scott, director of Chiltern Power, said in Utility Week’s future cities feature: “We need to start nailing down some specifics if we are to be sure they are not simply an excuse for a lot of conferences.”

One way in which the EU Horizon 2020 framework and Triangulum are trying to tackle this problem is by obligating all seven cities to publish their data and associated findings in a public forum, for the consumption of the wider future cities community and mandating a common ICT platform across multiple city workstreams – energy, transport, water and so on.

Looking forward, the expectation is that the current wave of funding in the future city area will steadily transition into business-as-usual practices for cities and local authorities in the UK. This will mean the cities of the future will have to take on a far more proactive role in managing their infrastructure, with particular focus on their inherent energy assets. It is worth remembering that before nationalisation in the 1940s there were hundreds of individual municipal and city-owned electricity generation and supply utilities providing local services for their local citizens.

My prediction is that the most profound and immediate change in this market will come in the way a city or local authority takes ownership of its distributed generation assets, how they are managed and how they can be leveraged to provide a better quality of energy service to citizens. Spearheaded by energy secretary Ed Davey, and with new regulation from both the Community Energy Taskforce and from the Heat Network Delivery Unit, the UK government has made clear its strategy now no longer revolves around energy services being delivered by the big six but, instead, aims for a “big six thousand”.

The beginnings of a business-as-usual approach to future city development and integration have already started, with a handful of UK cities publicising their intentions to set up their own municipal energy companies. For example in January this year, Bristol City Council’s Cabinet set out pioneering plans to establish its own municipal energy company, called Bristol Energy.

Wholly owned by the council, Bristol Energy aims to deliver social, economic and environmental benefits to its citizens by guaranteeing its customers competitive, fair and simple energy tariffs, with any profits reinvested back into local communities. In essence, Bristol will generate its own energy through its vast distributed generation assets and district heating networks and, via its retail licence, sell that energy back to local citizens. A partial turnaround, then, to the way things were before nationalisation.

Looking forward, a future city will use its energy assets not just in the ancillary services and retail service space, using a centralised control platform, but will want to build a common architecture that integrates and incorporates energy data with other infrastructure owned and operated by the city.

These could be assets such as traffic management, street lighting, distributed generation assets, building management systems, air quality monitors, and smart parking sensors. It might be 5-10 years out, but it is not impossible to envision the entirety of a city’s infrastructure being optimised and controlled from a central control room as cities take back ever increasing control of their destinies.
Thomas O’Reilly, head of UK strategy for digital grids, Siemens

Time for cities to take control?

Cities are engines for converting resources – energy, brainpower and raw materials – into value.
In a resource-constrained world where cities are the engines for growth (and hopefully also plant the seeds for sustainability in resource use and maintaining lifestyles), there may well be a call for cities to take more control of their supply chain.

Historically, up until the late Victorian age, cities and municipalities in the UK took control of supplying water services and sometimes energy services. This was part of a competitive situation where cities were looking to attract and retain industry and people.

What has changed? Cities are still in a competitive situation, but the competition is now, for the largest cities, global. Taking control of services might once again be in vogue. In the water sector, for instance, the institutional arrangements are nearly all in place in England and Wales. Soon there will be with retail competition for large consumers – there are already inset appointments for supply and distribution – and in the future there may be competition in resource development and supply. In such a world, integrated supply chains could in principle be developed outside the current water company system. Energy supply is similarly open to competition, such that it is feasible for multi-utility entrants to operate complete or partial city systems.

Of course, cities and their inhabitants will have to be convinced that the balance of risk, cost, efficiency and benefits supports the a new model. Mike Woolgar, managing director and environmental and water management, Atkins