Power to the people: building Nice's smart grid

But oddly, there seems to be little consensus on what a smart city actually is, what it does or why it should exist. Ask the questions ‘Smart how? And for whose benefit?’ and you’re quite likely to get either a blank look or a rush of jargon generally involving the terms ‘big data’, ‘human/IT capital’, ‘top down’, ‘bottom up’ or ‘multimodal’. Concrete examples of how a smart city might actually work and how it might solve problems are few and far between.

It was refreshing, therefore, to be able to visit a pilot scheme applying smart city principles to a real technological issue that cities are increasingly going to face in coming years: rather than other smart city projects, which distribute sensors over a region to gather data on traffic, air quality, light levels and so on, this is a smart grid project, which is strictly focused on how a reliable electricity distribution infrastructure can be maintained when the power is being generated by a variety of sources, including a significant proportion of renewables that are, to a greater or lesser extent, intermittent.