Smart Transition of EU cities towards a new concept of smart Life and Economy

Project Information

mySMARTLife

Grant agreement ID: 731297

DOI

10.3030/731297

Project closed

EC signature date 26 October 2016

Start date 1 December 2016

End date 30 September 2022

Funded under

• SOCIETAL CHALLENGES - Secure, clean and efficient energy

Total cost

€ 21 156 114,61

EU contribution

€ 18 656 102,41

Coordinated by

FUNDACION CARTIF
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - mySMARTLife (Smart Transition of EU cities towards a new concept of smart Life and Economy)

Reporting period: 2020-06-01 to 2022-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

mySMARTLife project has defined during the 70 months of its execution an Urban Transformation Strategy to support cities in the definition of transition models, as a suitable path to reach a high level of excellence in its development process, addressing the main city challenges and progressing to the smart people and smart economy concepts. These two concepts are considered as the main drivers to accelerate the transition towards sustainability.
The main instrument to achieve this very ambitious strategy is the Advanced Urban Planning, consisting of an integrated approach of the already planned city interventions on the basis of a rigorous impact assessment, an active citizen engagement in the decision-making process and a structured business approach from a innovative so-called city business model perspective to the economic framework for big companies and local SMEs and Start-Ups.
The foundations of the transformation strategy are the following:
1. Smart people concept. Study and development of innovative ways to involve citizens in the development of the transformation, increasing the social acceptance of the technologies by means of a better understanding of the associated benefits.
2. Smart economy concept. Analyse in depth the key aspects for the city business model, considering what is needed to create an ecosystem for big companies and how to replicate it, what policies and actions are appropriate to promote innovative business models mainly for SMEs and entrepreneurs.
3. Introduce the concept of integrated urban planning from the point of view of the expected impacts ( social, economic and environmental) to understand the interaction between interventions and support the decision making process with clear indicators.
4. Large scale validation, addressing the city transformation by means of the implementation of very innovative solutions in the energy and mobility sectors, taking ICTs as main cross-cutting domain. Around 150 smart solutions implemented in the three lighthouse cities, collecting information, engaging citizens, providing an open data ecosystem to foster the development of added value services and strengthening impacts.
5. Foster a strong replication activity, involving lighthouse and followers in an extensive process of transferability analysis, best practices exchange and capacity building actions, leading to spread better solutions to reach impacts in a European dimension, strengthening the scaling up and market deployment of the technical solutions and creating new business opportunities to companies bringing competiveness, growth and job creation.
Nantes (France), Hamburg (Germany) and Helsinki (Finland) have acted as lighthouse cities and Bydgoszcz (Poland), Rijeka (Croatia) and Palencia (Spain) have been the followers.
The validation of the technologies implemented has been based on the definition of a rigorous evaluation procedure, based on standard KPIs, and in which the associated impacts have been tested and the results disseminated.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During this periodic report #4, the main work has been focused on the monitoring and evaluation of the interventions/actions, above all, energy and mobility pillars, which gather dynamic data. Apart from it, the actions of the three lighthouse cities have been completed, reaching 65,406 m2 of retrofitted buildings and 97,115 m2 of new buildings. Both retrofitting and new construction has increased the normative requirements, achieving a total of 37% of improved energy performance.
Additionally, the integration of renewables has exceeded 15.5 MWp, considering both PV and wind energy. Complementary to the renewable installation, batteries have covered a storage of more than 1.4 MWh. Special mention to the H2 injection, reaching peaks of 40% of injection, with an average of 12% of H2 injection in the district heating.
In terms of mobility, 4,350 electric vehicles have been deployed across the three cities, dealing with 12,477.09 tCO2/yr avoided. For other pollutants, 53.4 tNOx/yr, 2.5 tPM/yr and 5.2 tHC/yr have been avoided thanks to the replacement of combustion vehicles by electrical ones.
mySMARTLife has contributed to the development of policy papers in collaboration with the rest of the lighthouse projects. Rubén García-Pajares, mySMARTLife project coordinator, chaired during more than 10 months the collaboration activities. This activity was coincident with the beginning of operations of Scalable Cities Secretariat.
Finally, mySMARTLife during this period organised its Final Conference in Hamburg.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The period comprised in Reporting Period #4 (m43 to m70) has been crucial for mySMARTLife, when monitoring and evaluation of the actions and interventions have been carried out. As mentioned about, all actions have been completed and monitoring of them has reached the minimum requirements of 12 months.
In terms of impacts, apart from the previous overall numbers, it is worth to mention, in the case of the buildings, 29% of the final energy used by the buildings is covered by RES, which, combined with the retrofitting and new construction, results in 8,777.59 MWh/yr of energy saved compared with the initial situation. Translated into economic terms, 1,755,519 € are saved in total in one year.
Having in mind the previous numbers and also taking into consideration the tCO2 avoided due to mobility actions, air quality is highly improved by dealing with 19,344 tCO2/yr avoided (3,115 in Nantes, 8,815 in Hamburg, 7,414 in Helsinki), transforming the cities in more liveable and healthy cities.
Speaking about social aspects, mySMARTLife has involved citizens in the urban transformation through the Smart People concept. This is reflected in the satisfaction with the project results, positive behaviours and sustainable awareness. Digitalisation has been also crucial in the social pillar by providing citizens with new services and apps by means of the three urban platforms.

Hamburg image (from mysmartlife.eu) — Copyright: www.mediaserver.hamburg.de/Thies Raetzke

Helsinki image (from mysmartlife.eu webpage) — Copyright: Markus Sinervä

Nantes image (from mysmartlife.eu webpage) — Copyright: Markus Sinervä