UtilitY WEEK | 27th March - 2nd april 2015 2015 |
23
Operations & Assets
handful of UK cities publicising their inten-
tions to set up their own municipal energy
companies. For example in January this year,
Bristol City Council's Cabinet set out pio-
neering plans to establish its own municipal
energy company, called Bristol Energy.
Wholly owned by the council, Bristol
Energy aims to deliver social, economic and
environmental benefits to its citizens by
guaranteeing its customers competitive, fair
and simple energy tariffs, with any profits
reinvested back into local communities. In
essence, Bristol will generate its own energy
through its vast distributed generation assets
and district heating networks and, via its
retail licence, sell that energy back to local
citizens. A partial turnaround, then, to the
way things were before nationalisation.
Looking forward, a future city will use its
energy assets not just in the ancillary ser-
vices and retail service space, using a cen-
tralised control platform, but will want to
build a common architecture that integrates
and incorporates energy data with other
infrastructure owned and operated by the
city.
These could be assets such as traffic man-
agement, street lighting, distributed genera-
tion assets, building management systems,
air quality monitors, and smart parking
sensors. It might be 5-10 years out, but it is
not impossible to envision the entirety of
a city's infrastructure being optimised and
controlled from a central control room as cit-
ies take back ever increasing control of their
destinies.
Thomas O'Reilly, head of UK strategy for
digital grids, Siemens
Future cities are on the agenda on the
third day of the free-to-attend conference
at Utility Week Live, at the NEC in Birming-
ham in April.
Find out more at:
www.utilityweeklive.co.uk
TM
