All investments in a smart city project should have concrete results in subsequent budgets, through savings and return on investment, said Andrei Berechet, Business Development Director, Adrem, during the event “Smart choices for smart cities”, organized by Energynomics and BusinessMark.
“Talking about smart cities, we noticed that in the last two years there is more and more a frenzy about the development of projects called ‘Smart City’. It is not within my competence to assess whether all these solutions are really smart city solutions, as we suffer from a lack of standardization and clarity about the labels we use. From what I have noticed it is clear that, on the one hand, there is emulation in the market and I think there is also some mistrust that is stopping the market from really developing. I think it all comes from the fact that we still cannot fully analyze the benefits of what is called ‘Smart City’ – the tangible economic benefits, beyond the social side”, Andrei Berechet also explained.
Adrem is a group of companies present for 27 years on the local market, being active for over 20 years in the energy area; the group has three main divisions dedicated to this sector. Adrem Engineering specializes in infrastructure solutions, and for 15 years the company has been one of the leaders in the automation market for large-scale energy infrastructure in large areas. Adrem Invest is a company specialized in services for energy infrastructure in the field and Adrem Link is mainly addressed to energy users.
“Thus, we propose to start by looking at how to integrate these ‘smart’ islands. There are very beautiful collections in the country, mosaics of intelligent technologies – electric mobility, mobility planning, efficient lighting, telecommunications – but they remain, to a large extent, just independent projects. The same thing happens in the case of energy management of municipalities”, he added.
“There is a need for integration in energy management, which can bring cost reductions. We propose a concrete solution: the concept of municipal energy dispatching. There are many initiatives, all of them interesting, but they seem to manage only a specific facet of the aspects related to the energy consumption of the municipality. The Adrem Energy Hub solution is the point where all these issues come together, where the energy manager, assisted by energy dispatchers, think in an integrated way about the solutions and measures to be taken, both immediate, reactive, and long-term. We see an energy hub that integrates and monitors in real time all these services subordinated to the municipality, in terms of energy performance”, he said.
As software solutions become more accessible, their implementation can also increase the energy efficiency of smart cities.
“With the development of IoT solutions, we can say that now, compared to five years ago, the possibilities are limitless. We have interoperability solutions and we are no longer obliged to continue with the same technology already implemented, we are no longer restricted to it. At national level, we have implemented solutions in which we integrate multiple technologies, so we are prepared with the right solutions at municipal level as well.”
