The companies will develop a variety of solutions: to ensure excess power generated from renewable energy sources in the district – including sources such as solar panels or wind turbines – can be fed into the market; to enable electric vehicles to draw electricity from the grid or feed it back in; to store energy; to create easy-to-use services and to provide more flexibility and transparency in the distribution grid, all helping to lower electricity consumption and emissions.
The project is part of a larger initiative of the City of Helsinki to reduce its environmental footprint with a focus on sustainable and efficient generation, transmission and distribution of power.
“We have the ambition to develop the new Kalasatama district into a global benchmark for smart cities and we look forward to implementing the best available technology together with our global partners”, said Seppo Ruohonen, CEO of Helsingin Energia.
“In terms of scale, this is another big step forward in the development of a smarter and more flexible urban grid that can integrate distributed and renewable energy sources and help people to realize the vision of sustainable urban living,” said Bazmi Husain, head of ABB’s smart grids initiative.
“The new Smart Grid technology will enable the introduction of new innovative services to the consumers, as has been the case in the mobile telephone networks. Active involvement of residents will be enabled by new customer focused services and real-time energy tariffing,” said Jaakko Aho, head of Energy Solutions, Nokia Siemens Networks.
The consortium partners envision a smart grid based on industry-wide standards supporting a stable, secure, efficient and environmentally sustainable power system. It will also accommodate customer demand response management systems that allow local producers and consumers to interact with the network operator and the energy market to reduce peak loads and increase efficiency.
The companies signed the Memorandum of Understanding on technology cooperation to develop, test and implement smart energy solutions in Kalasatama in May.
The Kalasatama district in the heart of Helsinki will provide living space for 18,000 people and 10,000 work places by 2030. Housing construction work will start later this year.