3 Projects

The city of Amsterdam has over 850,000 residents from 180 different countries, who own more than 600,000 bicycles. The wider Amsterdam Metropolitan Area has close to 2.5 million inhabitants. The city has a strong commitment to encourage green research, development and investment in sustainable initiatives. As a result, the area is enjoying a rapid uptake of electric transportation and a growing number of companies are developing sustainable products that influence global business. Amsterdam is exceptionally well connected, both physically and digitally.

The city has acted in line with the EU’s 20-20-20 climate targets and has the ambitious goal to reduce CO2 with 40 % compared to 1990 by the year 2025. The City-zen project was one of the major projects in which the city worked with its partners to scale up innovative energy solutions and open networks.

The demonstration objectives of City-zen in Amsterdam were focused on retrofitting existing housing, making the e-grid smarter, and improving and expanding the heat grid.

Lessons Learned:

In 5 years of City-zen, the 20 projects yielded many lessons learned.

Top 3 lessons learned overall:

1. Connect

Although it is far from easy, it is also highly advisable to organize peer meetings and exchange ideas between teams from different cities as the meetings will lead to deeper levels of understanding

2. Plan time

Even when fully involved in the implementation of solutions it is important to devote time for experience sharing and dissemination

3. Empower citizens

Involve citizens/inhabitants and truly put them at the heart of the solutions' implementation

More overall learnings can be found in this document: http://www.cityzen-smartcity.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/interactive_final-deliverable-book.pdf

Learnings per project (for example, smart grid projects, retrofitting projects, etc) can be found in the project reports on this page: http://www.cityzen-smartcity.eu/home/reporting/deliverables/

The city of Innsbruck in Austria (120 000 inhabitants) defined its 2025 Energy Plan back in 2009. In this context, and as part of the SINFONIA project, the city has selected its eastern district to demonstrate the large-scale implementation of energy-efficient measures, with the objective of achieving on average 40 % to 50 % primary energy savings in the demo sites, and to increase by at least 30 % the share of renewables in the district’s energy mix.