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Are you interested in ICT solutions to reduce urban energy use?

Our summary today works with the article titled Smart sustainable cities – Exploring ICT solutions for reduced energy use in cities from 2014 by Anna Kramers, Mattias Höjer, Nina Lövenhagen and Josefin Wangel, published in the Environmental Modelling and Software journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how ICT – information and communication technology – can help reducing urban energy use. This article presents an analytical framework for ICT opportunities to be combined with household functions that use energy.

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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss with a special attention to Australian cities.

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The way cities are developed and managed is of fundamental importance for sustainable development. Several initiatives highlighted how ICT can be used to achieve cities’ climate targets by lowering energy use and greenhouse gas emissions from other sectors. ICT can be used to optimise the design, production, use and end-of-life treatment of products. The ICT solutions for cities is often referred to as the smart city. Smart city has been a strategic concept combining modern urban production factors within a common framework. The adjective smart and the concept smart city are used to highlight the importance and potential of ICT in helping the city to develop a competitive advantage and implies positive urban-based technological innovation and change via ICT.

Today, cities with strong environmental ambitions and telecommunication industries are seeking to understand how best to utilise ICT as an enabler for reducing energy use. For cities, it is a matter of having a better understanding of what types of ICT investments provide the best benefits for environment and society. The industry wants to understand which technology is most needed. However, it must be acknowledged that different cities have different needs because of their unique challenges. Therefore, a multitude of solutions are required along with adjustments to specific demands and prerequisites. The aim of this article is to explore how ICT can support the development towards low-energy  cities and to develop a supporting framework for cities and regional authorities who want to understand and capitalise on the possibilities presented by ICT to reach their climate targets by reducing energy use and how to find the best hot spots for actions.

In this paper, a citizen consumption-based life-cycle perspective is used for allocating and calculating energy use. A consumption perspective means that energy use is allocated based on where the consumption takes place in contrast to a production-based perspective. At an individual level, this means that all the energy used to produce products or services is allocated to the person consuming that product or service. The citizen perspective means that all the energy used by everyone living in the city is allocated to the city regardless where the production or consumption takes place. Therefore, the energy use for activities by citizens that take place outside the city’s boarders is also included. The use of a lifecycle perspective means that for all consumed products and services, al energy use from resource extraction to waste treatment is included in the calculation. A consumption-based lifecycle perspective therefore implies a wider span of relevant ICT solutions than if the focus were only on activities that take place within a city’s geo-political boundaries.

Despite the lack of connection between smart and sustainable cities, it is clear that ICT has great potential for supporting the transition to more sustainable cities, both as regards the management of urban systems and offering more support for sustainable lifestyles. The authors included temporal scope, object of target, unit of target, and range of target as considerations to define an environmentally sustainable city, and they used Stockholm as an example to create the analytical framework even though there are differences set by the city and the article’s understanding, like the city focuses on CO2 emissions while the authors want to help energy consumption.

The framework can be used to identify opportunities, pilots and existing solutions for the application of ICT to reduce energy use, like in the following examples. In the personal area, the largest energy use is connected to leisure travel, while many personal aspects have already been dematerialised through cloud computing. For housing, heating is the biggest energy consummator and ICT can help with intelligent operations for the energy grid. ICT can assist knowledge compilation and information sharing about food production and consumption. In the care sector, ICT can create more personalised services for each user. By looking for hotspots where household functions with a high energy use and opportunities for ICT solutions overlap, the areas with the greatest potential for energy reductions can be identified. The two main hotspots are the intelligent operations and soft transformation of transport and heating of buildings.

The most promising ICT solutions were collected but it was not easy to establish concrete figures about how much energy can be saved through these solutions. ICT has the capacity to change society completely and it is difficult to estimate the potential for energy reduction in a meaningful way because of the long term rebound effects and unintended consequences. This means that in order to establish the full impact of implemented ICT solutions, it is important to take into account all direct and indirect changes resulting from this including the impact from the ICT solution’s entire lifecycle. This also points to the importance of combining its implementation with policy and planning instruments to ensure that the efficiency gains actually lead to a reduced use of energy.

On the other hand, there is a very weak connection between the smart city concept and ecological sustainability. Instead, smart city can be seen as a marketing tool to attract investment, businesses, residents and tourists. This is important and calls for caution when using the concept or when encountering smart city initiatives. As a way of emphasising initiatives when smartness is also used to promote environmental sustainability, it is proposed that the concept of smart sustainable city is used. Another problem is that cities can have mismatch in their climate targets and opportunities presented by ICT solutions. Therefore, it is important to focus solutions on direct energy savings like becoming more energy efficient and collect information on energy use.

The lack of knowledge regarding the energy use of activities is a democratic problem since it hampers any informed discussion about what can, should and needs to be done and whose responsibility it is. ICT has great potential for highlighting these issues. Therefore, it can make energy use become something with which they should and must deal. In order to turn the potentials into real savings, cities need to explore the opportunities thoroughly and investigate how they can best support the implementation of different ICT. Meanwhile, businesses need to learn how best to design and implement ICT solutions that decrease energy use.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, as the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. A city can become smart and sustainable by having climate targets and using ICT strategically to help achieve those targets – because ICT has great potential in highlighting potential issues with energy use for example.
2. In order to turn the potentials into real savings, cities need to explore the opportunities thoroughly and investigate how they can best support the implementation of different ICT.
3. Businesses need to learn how best to design and implement ICT solutions that decrease energy use.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. What do you know about your city’s sustainable efforts?
2. How are you personally using technology to monitor your energy consumption?
3. How do you personally use technology to reduce your energy consumption?
4. What do you think would help you to reduce your energy consumption?

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