This week’s Smart City roundup features a partnership to bring smarter building management to the enterprise, a survey that reveals many still aren’t aware of smart city benefits, a bridge that may set the infrastructure benchmark for smart cities and a property management company that plans to trial smart city innovations.

NRG and Lucid join forces for smart offices

NRG Renew LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of NRG Energy, Inc. and a top independent power producer in the U.S., and cloud-based building management service provider Lucid Design Group, Inc. announced a channel partnership that aims to accelerate the adoption on Lucid’s BuildingOS platform among NRG Renew’s enterprise clients.

This partnership is designed to help organizations accelerate their path to clean and distributed energy by modernizing their portfolios of commercial buildings.

To kick off the partnership, Lucid will deploy its BuildingOS to 2,500 buildings of select NRG clients by the end of 2015. This will enable NRG Renew customers to unlock new value from their building data and chart their path toward a more efficient use of energy and conversion to clean energy sources. BuildingOS’ powerful reporting engine will ensure that employees across an organization can instantly access and share that data in real-time, resulting in quick, measurable efficiency and productivity gains. NRG Renew will also use BuildingOS to help clients identify opportunities for clean energy, efficiency and smarter energy management practices.

“Our goal is to develop scalable, productized microgrid solutions that bring efficiency, renewable energy and intelligent control to our energy system,” said Robyn Beavers, Senior Vice President of Innovation at NRG Renew. “Our partnership with Lucid will help us deliver on that goal by empowering organizations to use energy data to guide decisions that make those solutions a reality.”

Survey reveals we’re clueless about smart cities

British telecommunications company Arqiva, Inc. released the results of a survey regarding smart cities, revealing that despite ongoing government smart city projects, 96 percent of Brits surveyed online were not aware of any ongoing smart city initiatives during the past year. The survey also revealed that 29 percent of the survey respondents believe that connected city projects will deliver better living environment for its residents, but 23 percent were not entirely clear about the benefits a smart city brings.

Those who participated in the online survey have different beliefs as to what the government should be focusing on. Fifty-seven percent of the respondents believe that traffic congestion is the number one problem, and 33 percent believe that it should receive smart technology spending priority. Parking is perceived as the second-most identified issue by British adults that needs immediate attention, but in Wales, 54 percent of Welsh respondents stated that finding a parking space is a priority issue.

“Councils desperately need to find a way to harness the enthusiasm of the tech-savvy younger generation,” concluded Arqiva Business Development Director of Smart Metering and M2M Sean Weir. “If done correctly, they create powerful advocates to spread awareness – if done wrong, they risk their city’s economic future.”

Memorial Bridge gets smarter

The New Hampshire Department of Transportation (NHDOT), the Maine DOT, the University of New Hampshire and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) have partnered for a project that will turn the Memorial Bridge, which connects the city to Kittery, Maine, into a smart one.

The project will embed 250 sensors on the two-year-old lift bridge, which will turn it into “a self-diagnosing, self-reporting, smart infrastructure,” able to continually monitor traffic, environment and the structural condition of the bridge. The project aims to be the benchmark for future smart infrastructure projects, such as gusset-less truss connections, structural metalized steel coating and vertical lift balance system.

The project will utilize the $355,000 FHWA Accelerated Innovating Deployment (AID) award to enable the bridge to collect data, such as traffic, stress, vibration, wind speed, temperature and humidity. The sensors used in the Memorial Bridge will be powered by tidal energy through a turbine system installed at a bridge pier.

Canary Wharf to trial smart city technologies

Canary Wharf Group plc launched the Cognicity Challenge, a competition that aims to find the next big things in smart city technologies, and it has now chosen three technologies to pilot in its properties over an eight-week period. BlockDox, Puckily and 3D Rep were chosen to each receive £50,000 in funding, and their technologies will be trialed into Canary Wharf’s estate.

BlockDox and Puckily were tied in first place for the “Connected Home” stream and will share the £50,000 cash prize and collaborate to bring their technologies together so homes can better be managed via connected devices. Puckily makes connected devices that can be controlled remotely, while BlockDox has an app that provides a way to simplify tasks, such as organizing repair work and contacting management.

As for 3D Repo, the company won in the “Virtual Design and Construction” stream and will enjoy a £50,000 cash prize so it can further develop its open-source Building Information Modeling (BIM) platform that enables better collaboration for construction projects.

Photo by Unsplash (Pixabay)