Ethos Smart, as part of the Urban Europe Joint Programming Initiative and funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, is part of a team working on Project IRENE, researching future city energy resilience.
Based on the probability that there will be more city based power generation and storage, we are researching what kind of collaborative framework would be required to create policies, processes and procedures that will support the distribution of local city power to critical infrastructure at times of crisis.
In the future, smart cities will be powered by a highly decentralised energy systems, where energy demand is partially supplied by localised, renewable energy resources from wind, sun, and co-generation, and a significant percentage of buildings will be equipped with generation and even energy storage capabilities. Such an energy system will depend on large scale complex ICT systems to control energy demand and supply, called the smart grid, making it particularly vulnerable to interruptions in power supply…. with implications to the risk profile of this critical infrastructure
Ethos is leading the first stage of the research, looking at possible future city energy scenarios and exploring what kind of collaboration framework between the stakeholders should/could exist. The study will go on to identify some example policies, processes and procedures and examine how these could be codified into a smart grid.
For more information about this project please email [email protected] or visit
Project IRENE blog by Ethos Smart’s Project lead, Mike Davis-Marks