Case Study: Barcelona Municipal Services

In 2020, in collaboration with Barcelona’s City Council Commissioner for the 2030 Agenda, the Digital Future Society launched the Tech & Climate Open Innovation Challenge for smart energy management solutions. This initiative aimed to identify innovative solutions to reduce the environmental footprint of the technology sector in the context of climate emergencies. Awesense won the innovation challenge.

Bacelona de Serveis Municipals (BSM) needed to understand how much of the city’s electricity consumption was due to EVs, and where EV charging was occuring. This would greatly assist in their EV charger deployment planning processes. A major hurdle however was to effectively integrate EV charging session data and other grid data for analytics. The city had over 500 BSM charging points distributed throughout stations and car parks as well as over two years of EV charger session data.

The project started with the Digital Future Society’s Tech & Climate Open Innovation Challenge for smart energy management solutions. This initiative’s aim was to identify innovative solutions that reduce the environmental footprint of the technology sector in the context of climate emergencies. Awesense won the innovation challenge.

The Awesense Energy Transition Platform’s AI Data Engine integrated the numerous charge point and meter data from stations and car parks across the city. The data was cleansed and structured into a digital twin. Analytics were subsequently built using notebooks and visualizations on top of the digital twin using Jupyter, SQL & Python.

The insights from the data ingestion and analytics performed by Awesense proved invaluable. The city could identify where EV charging was taking place in their grid. The team at the City of Barcelona could also properly assess which sections of their grids were ready for more connected EV charging stations. Furthermore, they had the tools to perform continued management and optimization of these assets after deployment.