The Technology Driving Copenhagen’s Green Ambitions

This is Copenhagen, a city where you're more likely to find residents on a bike than a car and the weekend activity could include skiing on the rooftop of a waste energy power plant. This city isn't like the rest. It's considered to be one of the smartest cities in the world and it has its eyes on becoming the greenest too. Of course high on our mind here in Copenhagen is the goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2025. This is Mariusz. Estersen, the smart city program director with the Copenhagen Solutions Lab. This is where Copenhagen puts its smart city solutions to the test and the results of its work can be seen across its borders. The city now has four years to meet its target of becoming carbon neutral and the question is, will it have the technology to get there? We have done some of the more easy stuff already but but now it's getting increasingly difficult. Copenhagen made its commitment to go carbon neutral in 2010, and if it succeeds, the city would become the world's first carbon neutral capital. The city says it's on target to meet that goal. So far, it has cut emissions by 42 percent from 2005 levels. The installation of a smart waste system has contributed towards that. We started working with using sensors in garbage bins in the city of Copenhagen. I mean, the first scale was we have this area downtown that's really a party. And of course, there will be a lot of littering in this part of the city, so we say, OK, if it's doable to use this technology in that part of the city, then we could actually envision it in the rest of this city as well. Plus, Copenhagen has fully deployed a smart streetlight system. It features over 19 ,000 networked LEDs, a dynamic lighting system with occupancy sensors, and advanced controls for remote dimming. scheduling. It's one place I especially love to bicycle and there you can actually see how the the lighting bulbs or the LED it is actually so I'm an old guy that's why I use the term but the LED panels only goes to full light whenever I would pedal on my bike underneath these these lighting poles. It's an important feature for a city that relies on bikes. Nearly 50% of workers commute by bike and that's a good thing. considering that the city wants to completely ban cars from its inner center in the coming years mobility is really like the crux for for making a city carbon neutral so making certain that we can move people from point a to point b without emitting a lot of greenhouse gases that that's a huge challenge electric buses are one way the city aims to tackle that challenge copenhagen aims to transition its entire fleet to electric by 2025 but a lack of charging in infrastructure could stand in the way. That would be like the basic foundation for rolling out more electrical vehicles. And you have to plan that very early on because it's difficult and expensive to roll out a charging infrastructure in an existing city. So we really want to build it into the part of the city that is not fully developed yet. So it's really... It's very important to get in early on some of these issues surrounding the basic infrastructure. It's easy to see the value technology has already had. Just take a look at this picture of Copenhagen streets for the 1970s. A smart parking system has proven effective in reducing traffic, but this system is different from the rest. Cameras are good for something, but they're expensive and you have to mount them, you have to service them and stuff like that. So it's an expensive solution. At the same time, we had a lot of really good data on how parking spaces are used in the city of Copenhagen. Also data dating many years back. And that made us realize that instead of using a hardware paradigm, we wanted to use algorithms, use software instead. And then on top of all the data we had already in place, we tried to fuse that data. with data from weather and from events and stuff like that so so to make a really solid prediction and and now it's it's an open api so we went for for another type of solution where we actually want that data to to sit in in the absence of the parking vendors in copenhagen so we have like seven or eight different packing vendors that that you can use when you want to to street park in phobin hagen this is one of the many ways that Copenhagen is working with the private sector to meet its goals. Another high-profile initiative is a partnership with Google to measure air quality. The issue around air quality is that it's a very local phenomenon so there can be like a very big difference in the quality of the air in one part of the city compared to another part of the city and even in one end of the street compared to the other end of the street so it's very local and of didn't want to just like buy sensors and mount them in the entire urban surroundings in Copenhagen. We wanted to make certain that we really targeted the problem areas. Known as Project Air View, it uses Google Street View cars equipped with sensors to gather insight into local air pollution. The data is then sent to Google Cloud where it's analyzed and integrated into a giant map like this. Copenhagen combines a localized data with data collected from large stationary sensors and that data then gets analyzed by its university partners. One action point is make certain that we get these informations out to the ordinary citizens of Copenhagen. I would take the less polluted route even though I had to take a small detour, I would take the lesser polluted route to work. So you can actually use this data as a source of inspiration in your everyday planning as an ordinary citizen. It's an interesting partnership considering that Google is often at the center of debates around security and privacy. Just take a look at Toronto, where Google's association with a smart city project run by Sidewalk Labs was shut down after criticism from local residents. Data will be collected automatically by sensors and other technologies, so the opportunity for consent doesn't exist. But for Copenhagen, partnerships with big tech are an easy way to scale a project citywide. So I guess you need probably a mix of the small, more innovative companies that would really tailor, make the solution that would fit your problem. And then again, you would also need to have larger companies that would have access to infrastructure and would have staying power. in the projects because they are much better funded. Now, Copenhagen has been turning heads for years. In 2014, it was named the world's smartest city, and around 250 companies today find your home in the greater Copenhagen area, where they're really contributing towards more smart city efforts. We'll continue to dig into that and more in our next story, so stay tuned for that. Till next time, I'm Diana Blass, reporting for Current Insights.