Smart Services for resource optimized energy systems in urban districts

Starting point / motivation

The concept of a smart city explicitly refers to a sustainable city development. Smart city approaches was not developed further than the demonstration phase yet, in which the technical feasibility was priority.

Contents and goals

Therefore, the current project proposal contributed to increase the feasibility of smart city attempts through developing smart services. Through the development and elaboration of usable business models, the idea of a smart city was applied in the field increasingly.

Due to the fact that the development of smart services ia in a very early stage, the project was, as a first step, limited to the energy-economical aspects of the smart city approach within a definite area of a city (neighbourhoods). The key was the (optimised) integration of energy demand and energy supply within the neighbourhood. Therefore, a smart service was understood as a package of services that are necessary to facilitate the required integration of energy demand and energy supply of individual systems into the overall system neighbourhood.

Smart services were able to transfer the advantages of the total system and its optimised integration to the individual subjects (development companies, real estate developers, user groups, utilities).

Methods

Due to the active participation of the three city development areas Zell/See Limberggründe, Graz Reininghaus and Wien Donaustadt, the project featured a strong practical relevance (bottom-up approach). The smart service business cases were developed on the basis of these examples with respect to their specific conditions and requirements instead of choosing a more general approach.
Smart services were developed in analogy with the strategic product development for energy services. Standard procedures, which are applied in the energy services market, were adapted and enhanced.

As an economical basis for the development of smart services for the participating neighbourhoods, the diverse technical and energy-economical variants of the smart city concept were analysed by means of the methodical life-cycle cost analysis. Again necessary methodical adaptations and enhancements were implemented and tested on the demonstration areas.

Complementary to the three Austrian city development areas, experiences and lessons learned based on the implementation of smart city attempts in neighbourhoods in general and the development of smart services in particular were exchanged from international good practice examples during an expert excursion and an expert workshop. The specific examples were city development areas in Zürich, Basel, Freiburg, Berlin, Hamburg, Copenhagen and Stockholm.

In the second part, general valid derivations for future city development processes and conclusions for supporting policy framework conditions and political instruments were derived from the lessons learned which were extracted from the collaboration between the three participating development areas in Austria.

Expected results

The key results from the project were on the one hand business cases for smart services, which were applicable in the three participating city development areas in Austria, and, on the other hand, general applicable methods and processes, which contribute to the implementation of smart city concepts in practice. These methods and processes were outlined in a clearly structured guideline.

e7 Energie Markt Analyse GmbH
Gerhard Hofer
Walcherstraße 11/43
A-1020 Vienna
Tel.: +43 (1) 907 80 26 - 55
E-Mail: gerhard.hofer@e-sieben.at
Web: www.e-sieben.at