Audrie van Veen

The European Investment Bank (EIB) approved the creation of a brand new financial instrument, the Smart Finance for Smart Buildings initiative. The aim is to make investments in energy efficiency projects in residential buildings more attractive to private investors, through the intelligent use of EU grants as a guarantee.

This new instrument, together with other EU policy initiatives for smart buildings, aims to unlock a total of €10 billion in public and private funds between now and 2020 for energy efficiency projects. It is estimated that this could support up to 220,000 jobs, and help establish a renovation market for small businesses worth up to €120 billion. In addition, up to 3.2 million European families could be taken out of energy poverty.

Read more on the European Commission's website.

The City of Haarlem and Metrex, the EU network for Metropolitan Areas, organise an event about the role of local authorities in Smart City development.
In the morning the focus shall be on the physical infrastructure and in the afternoon on the
opportunities in the social infrastructure and health. The number of participants is limited to
ensure a discussion and debate in depth. We aim to follow up this forum with other events,
to culminate in a METREX conference in 2019.

The European Commission has launched a new Horizon Prize on Big Data Technologies. EUR 2 million is available for improving electricity grid traffic forecasting in terms of scalability, accuracy, speed and use of computational resources.

The EU subsidizes innovations in the Horizon 2020 programme. Recently, new calls for the period 2018-2020 were published.
Topics vary from research and education in energy transition to consumer pull for a new energy market, from CO2-conversion to modelling and social aspects of the energy transition.
Find the topic that interests you by scrolling the EU Horizon 2020 participant portal via the link below.

Expect at least 6 months of preparation time for an EU-innovation project that can face the fierce competition for subsidy. Projects generally consist of more than 10 partners from at least 3 European Member States, and have a budget of 5-30 million Euro, depending on the call. Please make sure you read the whole call text before thinking of applying. And newcomers are strongly advised to join a consortium of experienced Horizon 2020 partners to make a good chance.

The most known application of Blockchains is the controversial Bitcoin so far, but this new European prize will explore the unique potential of Blockchains for creating decentralised solutions to societal challenges which are more effective than traditional centralised approaches.

Goal is to stimulate the development of out-of-the-box multidisciplinary solutions to social challenges in areas such as support of fair trade, increasing transparency in production processes, decentralizing data governance and enhancing privacy, improving accountability and contributing to financial inclusion.

The European Commission has launched the new Prize: 'Blockchains for Social Good'. 5 prizes of EUR 1 million each will be awarded to innovators that use Blockchain technology to develop decentralized solutions bringing about positive social change.

Applications must be submitted before the 25 June 2019. The proposals will be subject to public scrutiny and will eventually be evaluated by an independent jury. The detailed rules of contest will be available in February 2018.

Read more at the website of the European Commission.

Recently, Amsterdam Smart City visited the World Smart City Expo in Barcelona. There I met with several European Cities to see what knowledge and experiences we could share. Most cities are organising pilots or demonstration projects in a city quarter aiming at energy transition and fighting climate change. But very few of them roll out or replicate these projects on a larger scale.

Earlier, we posted about the upscaling research of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. https://amsterdamsmartcity.com/posts/organizing-smart-city-projects-lessons-learned-fr.
It is good to see the research in this field grow, and we will keep following it closely and sharing it with you here.

But what could cities themselves do directly to accelerate the upscaling process?
In Barcelona, Nathan Pierce, Programme Director of EU-project Sharing Cities for the Greater London Authority, shares his thoughts with us about cooperation between cities in the short interview below.

As Nathan describes, not only will cities learn from each other, together they will also form a huge upscaling potential for sound new business models developed in these pilots and demonstrations. And together, a group of cities will have interesting procurement power compared to one city on its own.

Therefore, the coming years the Amsterdam Economic Board will interact with other cities to see what business models shoot up in their local projects and how we could let them grow in our region. And on our turn, we will share our successful business models to see if we could scale them up abroad. Above that, we'll do our best to involve scientists such as AUAs mentioned above to learn even better while doing.

If you are a city interested to work with us on this, please leave a reaction in the comments below.