During the period of 17-19 January, 2018, the Deputy Director of the European-Ukrainian Energy Agency, Oleksandra Gumeniuk, was kindly invited as an observer to the organized workshop within the framework of the EU’s “Smarter Together” project in Munich.

Smarter Together is a project that is part of the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program. The goal of the initiative is to develop co-created and replicable Smart City solutions in 5 concrete areas– citizen engagement, district heating & renewable energy, holistic refurbishment, smart data and e-mobility.

The European lighthouse cities Vienna, Munich and Lyon; the follower cities Santiago de Compostela, Sofia and Venice; and the observer cities Kiev and Yokohama come together in order to improve the quality of life of their citizens.

Smarter Together will prepare the ground for large-scale replication and ensure an in-depth knowledge transfer. Additionally, the focus is to set up Smart City business models and user-centric innovation in order to contribute to positive societal dynamics.

During the workshop in Munich in the frame of the Smarter Together Project all participants were involved into discussions on the topics as e-car sharing, energy efficient urban development, virtual power plant, funding opportunities for cities etc.

E-car sharing and e-mobility.

Lighthouse cities: Lyon, Munich and Vienna presented its experience and there was interesting discussion. Among users of e-car sharing – it turned out very popular. In some cases it is even more beneficial for the user than use the taxi or have an own car. Users are excited about driving new models of e-cars and it is even bigger motivation than just a need. Also as an advantage of car sharing users can leave the car on the parking station without bring it back, so people who drive at night to the airport before their long trip are happy to leave the car on the parking of the airport.

Also, it turned out, that according to new rules in European cities, for the developers of residential buildings is a must to spend 30% of the infrastructure budget for e-mobility. So families when move to new apartments don’t have to buy a car. Usually the price for the car is from 20 Euro per hour, which includes 80 km of travelling or 30 Euro per 3 hours and different other packages which depend on daytime, day of the week and other. The price includes already all costs as petrol or charging, insurance. Being honest, representative of Leon shared the experience, that not many business class cars are at the market of car-sharing, the majority are middle class cars.

In Vienna for example, there is a residential microdistrict where old multi apartment buildings were refurbished and in 80% the structure of its residents wasn’t changed. And company as an experiment started to provide the service for e-car sharing with only 3 electrical cars, but its exploitation already reaches 6 hours per every day totally. If you have more interest about experience of e-car and car sharing of Leon, Munich and Vienna, don’t hesitate to contact us, so we will prepare more detailed information.

Car-sharing operators in Vienna: www.car2go.com , www.drive-now.com , www.carusocarsharing.com , http://carsharing-wien.net/ , https://caroo.at/ , https://carsharing247.com

Sustainable and energy-efficient urban development.

Munich recently started to implement a smart city framework strategy, introducing more smart city technologies in new developments. For Neuaubing-Westkreuz/Freiham, Munich’s Smarter Together project area, the key number is ‘20’: In this pilot district, Smarter Together aims to cut CO2 emissions by more than 20% and raise the use of renewable energy to above 20% while at the same time increasing energy efficiency by more than 20%. Munich’s goal is to be carbon-neutral in Neuaubing-Westkreuz/Freiham by 2050.

While Freiham is a new housing development, many of the residential properties in Neuaubing and Westkreuz were built in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. This diverse district is therefore an ideal test ground for Munich’s smart city solutions and reflects current urban realities. Apart from Smarter Together, two other projects are currently tackling smart city issues in Munich: City2Share (http://www.city2share.de/city2share.html )and Civitas Eccentric (http://civitas.eu/eccentric/munich ).

Smarter Together Munich is working to:

 

  • Promote e-mobility

  • Install smart energy-efficient street lighting

  • Refurbish houses to reduce energy consumption, aiming towards 100% renewable energy

  • Circulate a SmartCity app that creates intelligent links between all services

  • Install a smart urban data platform as the technological backbone of all smart city measures

 

Under the aegis of the Smarter Together project, the City of Munich is cooperating with eleven business and academic partners. Between now and 2021, it will invest a total of around EUR 20 million in the 350-hectare district, of which EUR 6.85 million will come from the EU. More detailed information about energy strategy in the frame of this project, please go to link:

https://www.muenchen.de/rathaus/dam/jcr:78dc51af-9423-4c68-8a42-3c790e840c43/handzettel.pdf

 

Virtual Power Plant.

Stadtwerke München (SWM, Munich City Utilities, Germany), has jointly with Siemens Infrastructure & Cities created a virtual power plant in which a number of small-scale, distributed energy sources are pooled and operated like a single installation. The main aim of SWM is to improve the reliability of planning and forecasting for decentralized power generation sources in the area which it supplies, by means of this virtual power plant devised jointly with Siemens. In the first stage, unit-type cogenerating stations with a total rating of eight megawatts (MW) were integrated, along with renewable energy generating plants amounting to twelve MW. The core component of this virtual interconnection is the Distributed Energy Management System DEMS. It ensures that Stadtwerke München can not only optimally deploy and operate its decentralized energy sources and loads, but also add more value from greater marketing scope.

Generally, a virtual power plant (VPP) is a cloud-based distributed power plant that aggregates the capacities of heterogeneous Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) for the purposes of enhancing power generation, as well as trading or selling power on the open market. Examples of virtual power plants exist in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

A virtual power plant is a system that integrates several types of power sources to give a reliable overall power supply. The sources often form a cluster of different types of dispatchable and non-dispatchable, controllable or flexible load (CL or FL) distributed generation (DG) systems that are controlled by a central authority and can include microCHPs, natural gas-fired reciprocating engines, small-scale wind power plants (WPP)s, photovoltaics (PVs), run-of-river hydroelectricity plants, small hydro, photovoltaics, biomass, back-up gensets, and energy storage systems (ESS).

Also, in the competitive electricity markets, a virtual power plant acts as an arbitrageur between diverse energy trading floors (i.e., bilateral and PPA contracts, forward and futures markets, and the pool).

In the evening we were invited to participate in Annual Exhibition 2018 : Munich thinking ahead – 125 years urban development at the City Hall Munich where we were presented achievements of Munich urban planning and success stories of European city as Barcelona by City Transformation Agency.

During the last day we were getting acquainted with the funding mechanism of urban infrastructural projects including successful and unsuccessful stories. Also we were performed an example of crowdfunding for the photovoltaic station on the roof of the central office building in Lyon.

The European-Ukrainian Energy Agency is invited to take an active part in the project and further explore the intelligent solutions used within the project. Keep track of our news.