Advancing the smart city objectives of electric demand management and new services to residents by home automation—learnings from a case

Abstract

Smart city projects explore solutions to improve the sustainability of urban infrastructure. In Kalasatama, a new smart city district being built in Helsinki, a solution to excite the availability of electric demand management and other energy-related services for residents is being tested. The city has made installing a specified minimum set of home automation devices obligatory in each apartment in the district, with the intention that entrepreneurial companies would start to offer energy management solutions based on that automation. This case study examines the utilisation of home automation in energy management at a point in time when approximately one-third of the dwellings in the smart city district are complete. According to the results of the study, companies developing and building apartments in the area of Kalasatama do not seem to find the regulation concerning home automation to be directly beneficial. Also, the availability of energy management services, based on the home automation solution, seems to remain low for the residents of the district. Based on these findings, we propose that similar smart city projects should be subject to a wider dialogue between policymakers and prospective market participants in the project conceptualisation phase.