The decarbonisation of cities requires the energy system to be fully renewable and the demand side such as buildings and transportation able to flexibly react to fluctuating renewable supply. In addition, circular economy concepts and smart waste management are needed to reduce today’s overconsumption of resources.

IoT solutions play a major role on different scales: on the spatial scale of a building, the control of smart appliances and HVAC systems can provide the required flexibility and reduce energy demand. On a neighborhood or city level, the electrification of buildings and mobility needs to be well managed so as not to overload the existing electrical network infrastructure. On a temporal scale, the power system stability demands fast control actions in the microsecond time scale, whereas buildings with their thermal loads react slower on a minute or hourly timescale. These multi-scale management challenges require an IoT framework for end users, system operators and manufactures to understand how to connect various devices and scale up IoT solutions across various sectors and scales. An Urban Scale IoT framework must be interoperable, communicate across sectors, maintain security and handle different levels of temporality.

In the keynote, IoT solutions on a building and city scale are discussed from the angle of accessibility to data, needed shifts from today’s proprietary energy management solutions and gaps in urban data and IoT device management dashboards. To enable the creation of new services for the building, mobility and waste sector, we propose an open source integrated platform for urban data handling, data analytics and smart modeling solutions. Through scenario building, modeling and smart energy management, we aim to facilitate the transition towards zero carbon cities.