Port city gets smart with energy management

The City of Arnhem has selected OpenRemote’s open-source IoT solution which will allow the city’s energy managers to automate and oversee a distributed energy system combining solar and wind power installations, electric fleet chargers, cold ironing for ships and battery storage, through a powerful desktop and mobile application.

“We are currently developing our own customised solution with the active support of the OpenRemote team,” said Peter Swart, program manager energy at the City of Arnhem.

“The end result will be a smart energy management system that is tailored to our specific optimisation and reporting needs and hosted in our own secure environment. It will become a key tool to facilitate and improve the work of both our energy managers and maintenance personnel.”

Unified power

The solar and wind energy produced at Kleefsewaard, an industrial park located east of the city, is used for charging electric vehicles across the city as well as powering the ships docked in its harbour (cold ironing).

In order to maximise the use of local renewable energy, the City of Arnhem needed an energy management solution capable of predicting power generation, as well as optimising the vehicle charging and cold ironing, with the use of an additional energy storage unit.

The new mobile application will be able to forecast power generation, consumption and carbon costs for the upcoming 24 hours. These essential data points are used to define optimal charging and discharging cycles for the energy storage unit, assess the vehicle fleet storage capacity, while considering the minimum required power indicated by the charging service provider.

Users will automatically be alerted by the app in case of abnormal system behaviour, as determined per pre-defined rules and receive a first analysis of the potential root cause.