Smart Sustainable Public Spaces across the NWE region

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NEW faces a great challenge to shift towards a low carbon economy by 2050. Municipalities play a pivotal role, as they account for 70% of the NWE energy consumption and CO2 emission. Especially, standard public street lighting accounts for ~30% of municipalities‘ total electricity consumption. Advances in intelligent lighting systems offers the opportunity to significantly increase energy efficiency, thereby reducing the carbon footprint. SMART-SPACE aims to facilitate the uptake of smart lighting in small/mid-size municipalities to enhance energy-efficiency and reduce CO2 emission. Using smart sensors attached to light poles, street lighting intensity can be automatically adjusted to the actual local needs, realizing 60% reduction in light energy consumption. However, until now implementation occurred mainly in small scale pilot projects, indicating that to reach the low carbon objectives requires a strong, transnational collaboration to move beyond piecemeal solutions. SMART-SPACE brings together end-users (cities/citizens) and innovation stakeholders (research institutes, SMEs, enterprises) from NL, BE, FR and IE to jointly facilitate the uptake of smart lighting to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emission. SMART-SPACE will jointly: 1) develop an interoperable smart lighting platform adjustable to the specific needs of different municipalities; 2) demonstrate the impact of smart lighting on energy consumption and CO2 emission, while enhancing public space safety and liveability at 4 pilot municipalities; 3) increase awareness on smart lighting technologies and their potential; 4) develop a transition roadmap with procurement standards, implementation guidelines, and policy recommendations to the EU, and 5) establish the sustainable SMART-SPACE knowledge centre. On the long-term, SMART-SPACE will result in the widespread uptake of smart lighting technologies for the public space to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emission across NWE.

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