The ninth edition of the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona closed off on a high note, with an announcement from Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB), the local public transport authority, seizing the chance to highlight its new masterplan that focuses on a major fleet overhaul to reduce emissions through widespread electrification. This presentation saw Endesa X take center stage, as it plans to install two brand new ultra-fast charging stations using pantographs for electric buses on Barcelona’s H16 line, ensuring all 22 TMB buses running on this line are swiftly charged. These innovations stem from the expertise Enel X gained in delivering innovative projects for public mobility, as it strives to transform in reality the main theme of Barcelona’s Expo: “Cities made of Dreams”.
From Smart City to Digital City
The Smart City Expo World Congress was the stage for Enel X to showcase its experience in providing a wide range of solutions for urban areas as it responds in an efficient and innovative way to specific and shared needs of local government officials, citizens, and businesses.
These sustainable solutions are capable of responding to specific needs and still be scaled globally. The Catalan event is uniquely poised to be a crossroads for institutions, businesses, and stakeholders to share experiences, best practices while tracing new and exciting paths in the journey towards a smart urban revolution.
We can already reap the benefits in the fields of innovation and sustainability thanks to the widespread use of advanced sensors and artificial intelligence, video surveillance and energy efficiency services, all of this, while we’re witnessing a “transformation of the transformation” phase. This is due to Smart Cities evolving into Digital Cities, thus opening the gates to a shared and responsible development.
It all starts with public lighting
Energy saving is first and foremost the main goal of a smart city. The most immediate and established solution to this issue comes from public lighting.
In Italy alone, Enel X manages 1.8 million city lights, delivering a superior lighting quality to over 3,300 towns, providing efficient LED lighting sources together with cutting-edge features like lighting control and the latest adaptive lighting tech.
Replacing dated lighting systems guarantees hefty economic savings and energy efficiency, together with increased levels of security and new opportunities for city dwellers, ranging from wireless services to e-mobility.
The set of innovative solutions offered by Enel X are future-ready to this day, as they’re engineered to work on a city’s entire ecosystem: public and architectural lighting, energy efficiency, digital solutions, public and private transport, urban design. Our portfolio of offers is available for city councils to benefit from a wide range of tailor-made services while engaging citizens as the main actors for change by providing them services and tools to make their home towns more efficient, more livable, more sustainable and more digital.
Digital, sustainable and participative
In a Digital City, every element is part of a whole as it connects with the surrounding environment. Hence, even a single lamppost is a piece of this 4.0 puzzle embraced by Enel X IoT platform: the Enel X environment designed so that public administrations can monitor and manage the multiple city services and city assets in a simple, easy and effective way. One key piece of Enel X digital offering consists of City Analytics tool: the new solution that allows the planning of services based on effective demand, through a systematic gathering, analysis, and elaboration of Big Data. It’s a data-driven solution in full compliance of privacy requirements, able to cross-reference open data from the public administration, localization data originating from smartphone and Ad Network applications, sensors and surveillance cams covering Enel X projects.
By monitoring elements like foot and vehicle traffic flows, estimates on numbers of tourists and residents, as well as the visualization of heatmaps regarding the busiest city crossroads, City Analytics is of great use to public administration offices. Digital, sustainable and participative. These are the 3 defining terms of future cities, where their dwellers are active participants in the urban evolutionary process by proactively voicing their opinions and ideas. Cities of the future will have a lot to learn from themselves and from their citizens and ultimately, this will lead them to improve, day by day.
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