Smart Cities Viewpoints

Thanks to massive investments in battery technology in recent decades, battery performance has been increasing, while costs have been coming down. New grid-scale battery storage capabilities have enabled the emergence of microgrids, which typically also incorporate distributed renewable and/or small-scale fossil generation capabilities. However, energy balance charts such as the one included in this post show that we still have a long way to go when it comes to the journey to zero-emission energy sources.

DHS recently held several webinars in the wake of its March announcement regarding Russian state-sponsored hacking group Energetic Bear/Dragonfly on utilities and critical infrastructure installations in the US.  The webinar focused on some of the more interesting and unique aspects of these recent attacks plus some countermeasures that end users can implement right now that can greatly reduce the likelihood of future attacks. 

Smart city cybersecurity, however, is rarely discussed.

Smart city cybersecurity, however, is rarely discussed.

Rapid adoption of IoT-based systems with the promise of significantly reduced operational costs is driving significant growth in the building and facility automation marketplace.

FIWARE is a framework of open source platform components which can be assembled with third-party platform components to accelerate the development of smart, IoT enabled solutions.

Nalco Water uses digital transformation and the Microsoft Azure cloud to create better solutions for managing water with an eye towards reducing cost and risk while improving sustainability. Microsoft itself used this technology to drastically reduce water usage at one of its own datacenters.

How have lithium batteries managed to dominate new grid-scale energy storage?

ARC recently attended the Smart Cities Connect conference, March 26-29 in Kansas City, MO at the Kansas City Convention Center. Here's what we saw.