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Eibar, testing laboratory for European public energy management

Efficiently measuring and managing energy consumption in towns and cities

Eibar Town Council and IK4-TEKNIKER are participating in the URB-GRADE European project on energy management to choose corrective actions to increase energy efficiency in the district without affecting the comfort and safety of citizens

Eibar is set to become one of the three localities chosen to test a European project that will set up a platform allowing towns and cities to more efficiently measure and manage energy consumption in the future.

The URB-GRADE project, which has the participation of the Eibar-based R&D centre IK4-TEKNIKER and Eibar Town Council plus another seven companies, local organisations and R&D centres from across Spain, Denmark and Finland, aims to explore the potential of the DaaS (District as a service) concept for the energy management of European towns and cities.

The aim is to improve the knowledge of the local authorities about energy consumption in their towns and cities by means of sensors and other technologies, and provide data in real time. Once organised onto a digital platform, these data will allow management to be carried out more efficiently, for example, of street lighting consumption in Eibar, of consumption by local businesses in Barcelona, or of homes in Kalundborg (Denmark), the three pilot projects in the initiative.

In the case of Eibar, they will be tackling street lighting, a service whose management problems are shared by urban environments across Europe, which means that the solutions found in the Gipuzkoan town will be used in similar scenarios in the future.

Initially, data on consumption in ten streets will be gathered and the corrective measures proposed by the platform will then be applied. These corrective measures may include movement and light sensors that switch the street lamps on and off depending on the needs; reduction in light intensity by means of electronic ballasts; upgrading of the lighting to more efficient technologies (replacing sodium vapour lamps by LED devices, for example).

The main users of the technology to be developed within the URB-GRADE project will be the municipal authorities, as the project is designed to become an important tool for urban planning and decision taking in a town or city. However, the initiative also provides for other significant players in a town or city’s energy management, like power supply companies and the end consumers themselves.

The information needed to generate the platform will be based on data capture through distributed sensors, as well as other open sources like data on the energy rating of buildings or information obtained by means of questionnaires.

The data will then be managed by means of CEP (complex event processing) techniques to generate the relevant information which will be supplied to all the players participating by means of a platform based on cloud storage of information.

Smart Cities

The URB-GRADE project consists of driving forward the public management of energy in the line of Smart Cities, an international trend to improve the management of urban communities, thanks to technology, social capital and the improvement in information gathering and use.

This trend can benefit tremendously from technologies in which IK4-TEKNIKER is a leader, so the tandem together with the town of Eibar constitutes an ideal testing ground to try out the URB-GRADE project in a scalable environment and which can be transferred to other urban environments.

IK4-TEKNIKER’s Electronics and Communications Unit was set up with the aim of integrating the centre's experience in technological research and serving various economic sectors, ranging from industry to the services sector itself. Furthermore, for several years now the R&D centre has been a member of the Artemis organisation, the European Network for Advanced Research and Technology in Intelligent Systems.

IK4-TEKNIKER

With experience spanning 30 years in research into applied technology and its transfer to companies, in addition to making advances in the development of Social and Healthcare Technology, the technological centre IK4-TEKNIKER has achieved a high degree of specialisation in four major areas (Precision Engineering and Mechatronics, Surface Engineering, Production and Automation Engineering, and Manufacturing Technologies), which enables it to put its state-of-the-art technology at the service of the business and social base.