Smart City Success Starts With Sharing Data, But What’s…
How can technology be deployed within our communities to improve the quality of life?
The answer to that question depends upon where you live, but metropolises hoping to modernize their infrastructure can learn some lessons from those who came before- places Boulder, Colorado, and Las Vegas, Nevada.
“They’re kind of a playground for different vendors to do pilots,” notices Cristine Korowajczyk, chief commercial officer of CelPlan Technologies.
Utilities considering smart cities applications are eyeing a cornucopia of benefits: energy and cost savings, improved safety and mobility, better traffic analysis, faster incident response, equity and digital inclusion, bolstering service to underserved or hard-to-access areas, and more. Of course, those fruits aren’t all low-hanging, and some come with a side of considerable risk.
The Role of Munis
Gabriel Garcia, who focuses on administrative and regulatory law for San Antonio, Texas-based CPS Energy, believes that municipally-owned utilities the one he works for can be drivers of smart city aspirations. Three elements need to come together to make that happen:
- Telecommunications infrastructure
- Legal authority
- Leadership at the community level
“We need communications technology in order to make our grids more resilient, to make our grids more reliable, and in order to create smart city opportunities,” Garcia told DTECH attendees last month in a session focused on maximizing such opportunities. “In that sense, municipal utilities can be the enablers, working with local partners and governmental partners to make that possible.”
“We’ve seen a lot focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) and the possibilities to make the grade more reliable, more resilient. We have vendors with every kind of equipment that will make all of that possible, and none of that happens without communications technology,” he cautioned. “You don’t hear that in these presentations, but that’s the reality.”
Sharing is Caring
CPS Energy is the largest combined electricity and gas municipally owned utility in the United States. With great power comes great responsibility- and a whole lot of data, which comes in handy. To create smart cities opportunities, Garcia emphasized the importance of sharing that data with community partners.
“In order to develop smart applications, you need data,” he reminded. CPS has a data-sharing agreement with several entities and provides additional information to other partners on a project-by-project basis.
The Texas Interlocal Cooperation Act, which authorizes local governments (including cities, counties, school districts, and state agencies) to contract with each other to increase efficiency and effectiveness in providing services, enables partnerships that would otherwise be nearly impossible. Many states have something similar on the books, allowing two or more entities to pool resources of all kinds, from contracts for widgets to sharing telecommunications infrastructure.
“We have worked closely with our senior leadership and our internal leadership to leverage our assets in this way,” said CPS Energy’s Garcia.
For example, CPS owns two data centers, a primary and a backup. The utility had some space to spare, so a few years ago it began sharing some elbow room with other government entities. By ensuring cost recovery, including O&M, CPS developed a per-square-foot rent formula, guaranteeing that ratepayers aren’t subsidizing the concept. The result is impactful savings for municipal partners, who can now tap into the same quality of space as a commercial data center might offer. It also reduces duplication of facilities by large governmental entities and promotes redundancy at a lower cost.
“We also are blessed to have fiber,” noted Garcia, acknowledging the foresight of leadership three decades ago to install fiber optic networks. “In our distribution system, we connect all of our substations, and we also have it through our transmission system. So what does that mean? That means that if you think about all the substations in the city, they’re all interconnected.”
Networks as a Service?
CPS Energy, which s a fiber with the city of San Antonio, is not a telecom provider, but essentially has the same network architecture as one would deploy.
“We don’t a network. We the infrastructure,” Garcia explained. “The city can then utilize that fiber to deploy their own network, their own electronics, their own optical equipment. And in this way, they have access to our fiber loops to connect municipal infrastructure to the closest location, i.e., to the closest substation, to where they have their facilities throughout the city.”
CPS Energy has also leveraged its advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system to make communities in its territory ‘smarter.’ CPS’s sister water utility, San Antonio Water System, has entered into an agreement with its AMI provider to use excess capacity to deploy smart water meters and leverage existing networks.
Moving toward open standards and high-quality utility data with Landis+Gyr | DTECH Interview Studio
It’s not always a seamless process to resources, however. Utility applications and smart city applications place quite different demands on a communication system, warned Kathy Nelson, founder and CEO of KN Utility Telecom Consulting.
“The first question is, is it one single network? Is that how you should treat it? Forcing all these applications on a single network would introduce capacity risks you probably don’t want to deal with,” she laid out. “It would expose your system to more security concerns, and it would increase the complexity of operating that map. So most of the technical challenges come up not because of the smart cities networks or the applications themselves… It’s the incompatibility of traffic profiles that makes it so challenging.”
“The issue is not whether a utility network can support a smart city application, but how they should be integrated,” she concluded.
According to Nelson, who enjoyed a long career at Minnesota’s Great River Energy before starting her consulting company, it’s common for utilities to be conservative about sharing their networks.
“I don’t want to face the internet. I don’t want to face the public. Well, what’s the number one thing for a smart city? It needs to be public-facing. I need my citizens to have access to what I’m providing to them,” Nelson explained. “So that is something else that really brings a problem, because for the public interface view, the public needs to do that through the internet.”
“‘People things’ are harder,” confirmed CelPlan Technologies’ Korowajczyk. “It’s [not easy] getting the public to trust what you’re doing and not thinking that Big Brother is watching me.”
Nelson recommends fiber with different strands or wireless with separate spectrums to overcome such hurdles.
“You can have one network layer that’s optimized for utility operations and one network layer that is focused on smart city services,” she suggested. “This approach will allow you to have dedicated spectrum. For example, you can have a frequency band that really carries the utility traffic and a different band that carries the smart city traffic. Or if you have certain utility traffic that’s not as critical, maybe a d band.”
“But you do have to have that multi-layered approach, because what introduces complexity is you not being able to separate traffic profiles,” she continued. “So separation, by design, makes the network scaling and managing operation a lot simpler. If you segment the layers between independent capacity planning, you can do independent growth, and it’s easier to isolate faults.”
Putting Together a Path
The City of San Antonio is still figuring out what it means to be a smart city for its residents. In 2023, the city’s Office of Innovation released the Smart Cities Roadmap and the Smarter Together Initiative, a community-driven vision for using technology to improve public services and quality of life. Highlights of its progress include smart LED solutions, the Better Futures Institute (BFI) encouraging STEM education, and a variety of smart city applications across entities and platforms.
What comes next? That’s not up to a utility, consultant, or network integrator to decide, but the residents themselves.
“Every city is going to define what that means for themselves,” confirmed CPS Energy’s Garcia. “That is something that every city is going to decide. As a municipal utility, we don’t do that. We are neighbors.”
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