Energy and Smart Cities

I am also starting to think about the interface between the energy and smart cities research areas. I think this could be a really exciting interface to explore as urbanisation rapidly continues the smart city - based around a city-scale pervasive ICT infrastructure - could be key to addressing the major sustainability, social and economic challenges faced over to the coming decades. Or at least the smart city will form a key component of the research and policy agenda. A couple of interesting examples within an energy and sustainability context that immediately occur to me are outlined below.

·      The development of urban smart grids, incorporating ICT (e.g. sensors, applications and tools) to monitor and control the bi-directional flow of energy between generators and users, is expected to enable the integration of renewables and the radical reduction of energy demand;

·      The emergence of smart buildings and transport systems, is expected to both make energy consumption more visible to users (and hence stimulate changes in consumption behaviours) and enable automatic management of energy consumption.

There has been considerable thinking on what constitutes a smart city (although the agenda seems to somewhat be directed by commercial interests – e.g. http://www.arup.com/Publications/Smart_Cities.aspx and http://www.theclimategroup.org/publications/2011/11/29/information-marketplaces-the-new-economics-of-cities/), but it seems to me much less into how this might actually facilitate the transition to low (or at least lower) carbon cities.

As a means of starting to bridge this gap, between smart and low carbon cities, I am offering a full PhD project to 2012 intake for Doctoral Training Centre in Low Carbon Technologies (at the University of Leeds). Hopefully, if a student signs up for the project, this will provide the opportunity to explore the integration of low carbon technologies into a smart city infrastructure. Currently I am thinking that a PhD project could explore the integration of Smart City infrastructure with technologies for:

·      Generating low carbon energy - e.g. integration of micro-renewables (solar, wind, heat pumps etc.) into new and existing building stocks;

·      Reducing energy demand - e.g. advances in materials for increasing the energy efficiency of buildings, or novel technologies that reduce the energy intensity of urban transport;

·      Storing energy - e.g. household and community scale storage of electricity and heat (to balance supply and demand).

Within the broader areas I outlined above it would be interesting to address research questions (such as those presented below) that require the integration of perspectives from across a broad spectrum of disciplines (e.g. ICT, web science, behavioural psychology, business models in digital economy and energy technologies).

·      What is the potential for energy demand reduction from combining adoption of novel materials (to improve the energy efficiency of buildings) with smart infrastructure that promotes changes in the behaviour of building occupants?

·      What are the ethical and privacy issues associated with the implementation of city-scale smart grids, given that associating energy use information with other data streams could be used to reverse engineer detailed lifestyle information?

·      How could smart city infrastructure enable the uptake of micro-renewables and energy storage technologies?

·      How would a smart city change the barriers and opportunities for energy demand reduction and decarbonisation of energy supply?

·      How could the design of smart city infrastructure influence requirements for low carbon technologies and vice versa?