This week’s Smart City features a virtual power plant to manage smart buildings, the EU Commission on the hunt for smart city partners, the AGT’s plans to lead Hamburg’s first smart city project, and a cool, smart way to light highways.

Virtual power plants for smart, energy-efficient buildings

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Eco-Shift Power Corp  has entered into a Master Services Agreement with Buffalo Watt Holdings to design and build proprietary software that will become the Building-level foundation of ECOP’s Virtual Powerplant Platform.

The Virtual Powerplant Platform aims to provide lighting products, smart energy management technologies and solutions  to reduce energy costs for mid-sized businesses to large multiple-facility corporations.

The partnership will create a Site Automation System that seamlessly integrates with Buffalo Watt’s existing Cloud-level demand management software, known as the Converged Energy Platform, that will provide a modern web-based user interface that is accessible by any web browser via desktop, laptop, tablet or smartphone. ECOP will fully own the proprietary Building-Level software, and related Intellectual Property which will allow the company to create smart buildings with control over lighting. Over time, additional modular components such as HVAC, compressors and pumps.

The Virtual Powerplant Platform will provide commercial and industrial energy users with the ability to transform their facilities into smart, energy efficient and cash-flow-positive buildings via ECOP’s state-of-the-art, IP-addressable light fixtures that have wireless communication.  Communication between the platform and the lights will allow for the increase or reduction of energy, depending on the demand and the software-embedded algorithms managing the facility.  ECOP’s clients will greatly benefit from the platform as it will also be managed by Eco-Shift Power on a 24/7 basis.

EU Commission looking for smart city partners

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The European Commission wants to move its European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities forward and to do so, it has announced that it is looking for partners.  Cities, companies from the public and private sectors, non-government organizations, European subsidiaries of non-EU companies are all invited to become founding partners of the European Innovation Partnership through an Invitation for Commitments.  Interested parties can apply online before June 15.

“We want to go a little bit further to create a network across three sectors: energy; urban mobility and transport; and ICT but rather than just having workshops and distilling best practices, we are looking through our open invitation for commitments for each potential partner to describe what it is planning to do or has done in terms of smart cities,” says Philipp Barth, Policy Officer in the Smart Cities and Sustainability Unit in the Directorate General for Communications Network, Content & Technology. “And on the basis of those concrete commitments, we will then try to cluster those partners into working groups so that there will be more opportunities for collaboration from the supply and demand side and for the launch of projects for procuring jointly and concretely working together.”

The Invitation for Commitment has no direct funding, but under the Horizon 20/20 program for 2014-2015, there is €200 million (about $278 million) to back up projects for smart cities.  Horizon 20/20 is a framework program for research and innovation with a focus area on smart cities and communities.  Every year, Horizon 20/20 looks for proposals which are funded.

The Commission is also in talks with private and public banks, including the European Investment Bank, for future funding.

AGT to lead Hamburg’s first smart city project

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Smart city solutions provider, AGT International, has been tapped by Cisco and the City of Hamburg, to lead the city’s first smart city initiative, expected to include smart traffic, smart street lighting, remote citizen services, as well as port operations and HafenCity, Europe’s largest inner-city development project.

AGT’s first project will be smartPort, leveraging its Internet of Things-based solutions for better traffic management and maximizing the efficiency at the port of Hamburg.  AGT will provide the IoT Platform to integrate all solutions into an operations center as well as its signature IoT Traffic Incident Management Solution.

Other projects within smartPort include an intelligent parking space control system for trucks and loaders to alleviate traffic and parking inefficiencies, a fully integrated traffic management system to optimize the flow of cars to prevent traffic jams and detect potential incidents, smart streetlights that optimize energy consumption, gather and analyze emissions data to reliably forecast noise, temperature, humidity and pollution, and monitoring for port infrastructures to ensure safe and efficient operations.

Cool, new way of lighting highways

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Though this series is dedicated to the Internet of Things, not all ‘smart’ solutions need to be connected to the Internet and some of them deserve to be recognized, like the Smart Highway designed by interactive artist Daan Roosegaarde and the engineering firm Heijmans Infrastructure.

What makes this Smart Highway unique is that it utilizes photo-luminescent paint strips to line the road.  The strips are similar to the glow-in-the-dark stars kids stick on bedroom walls and ceilings, but instead of ‘charging’ via light bulb, the paint strips ‘charge’ during the day.  The luminescence lasts for 10 hours.

This is an eco-friendly solution for keeping streets lighted without consuming electricity.  The glow-in-the-dark paint can also be used as weather indicators on roads wherein it will only be activated when a certain temperature is reached, or even used to direct drivers where to change lanes.

photo credit: Aristocrats-hat via photopin cc