Learn how you can make your city more sustainable at SCE
As Kathryn Willson recently wrote, more than 50 of our Microsoft CityNext partners will be with us at Smart City Expo World Congress November 14-17 in Barcelona, Spain.
They’ll include partners who specialize in helping cities improve their sustainability with solutions that span energy, water, building energy management, transportation, resource efficiency, and ecosystem services.
Managing water and preventing flooding
For example, our CityNext partner ireckon! will be in our booth at Smart City Expo. It helped the City of Breda in the Netherlands to manage water and prevent flooding while reducing costs with a cloud solution.
With two rivers and high rainfall, the City of Breda needed a comprehensive water management system, so it undertook the “Smart Data Management” Waterakkers project running on Microsoft Azure with the help of ireckon!.
The City of Breda can now analyze and visualize massive data collected by sensors and pumps around the city and can even predict pump failure—all in real time. Citizens participate by sending water observations through social media. The city can add as many sensors as it wants, has reduced maintenance costs, and is better able to prevent flooding.
Watch this short video to see how it works.
Enabling a smart grid
Our CityNext partner Powel will also be with us at Smart City Expo. Powel is part of an exciting pilot project with Microsoft and Agder Energi in Norway—which we recently announced—that will help create a more efficient, flexible, and intelligent grid of the future.
The project will create a cutting-edge smart grid solution to enable integration of renewables onto the grid and help keep pace with growing energy consumption.
Powered by the Microsoft Azure cloud, PowerBI, and Azure IoT Hub, the project will empower operators to better predict demand and engage distributed resources like rooftop solar panels, electric vehicles and smart homes. By tapping these resources instead of traditional power plants, this type of smart grid solution has the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gases and improve efficiency across electrical grids.
Watch this video from Agder Energi to see how it will work.
The pilot is a great example of a smart city digital transformation project coming together through collaboration of global and local contributors. It’s through these types of public-private partnerships that cities and utilities can advance energy management and improve sustainability for their communities.
Tackling your specific sustainability challenges
Today’s technologies can help communities of any size—small towns, cities, municipalities, or entire regions—adopt sustainable ways to meet the demands of urbanization. At Smart City Expo, you can learn how our partners can help your city with your specific resource challenges. You’ll find out how you can digitally transform management of your energy sources, water, waste, and more with help from ireckon!, Powel, and our other CityNext partners.
Meantime, check out our event page for up-to-date details on what Microsoft and our partners are doing at the Expo, to sign up for our pre-day event, and to request a one-on-one meeting with one of our subject matter experts.
