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Smart Cities

From Barcelona to Singapore, from Stockholm to Paris, from London to New York, town planners are striving to find solutions to the problems that are increasingly affecting the quality of urban life.

In many cases, these solutions rely on new technologies, leading to the creation of what are known as “smart cities”. Connected technologies, smart, open data, the Internet of Things, smart grids, new materials and clean energy can thus be used to build and invent a positive future.

Six criteria distinguish a smart city:

According to Rudolf Giffinger, an expert in the analytical research of urban and regional development at the Vienna University of Technology, these six criteria are:

  • A smart economy: productivity and wealth creation are improved thanks to a flexible and innovative ecosystem
  • Sustainable governance, with more integration of social and state services
  • Smart housing, which guarantees quality of life for citizens with the support of new technologies designed to reduce their environmental footprint
  • The green citizen: the objective is to create a cosmopolitan social and cultural capital in order to stimulate creativity and public participation in the life of the city
  • A sustainable environment, which emphasises the protection of natural habitats and the reduction of pollution
  • Smart mobility, which promotes new opportunities for development, by offering a more efficient, green, accessible and affordable mobility

 

Contributing to the development of smart cities

Renault Group is working with public sector stakeholders to learn about and discuss their vision of the future of the city. As Europe’s leader in electric vehicles, and with its commitment to continue to invest in innovative technologies, Renault Group is making its contribution to the development of smart cities.



Some examples of existing initiatives:


Renault Energy Services

A subsidiary whose mission is to invest in projects based around smart electricity grids, by creating privileged links with the energy stakeholders. Renault Energy Services will focus in the main on the development of smart charging projects, on the interactions between vehicles and the electricity grid (vehicle-to-grid) and on second life for batteries projects.
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The Z.E. Smart Charge app

Which is already available in Holland, makes charging smarter, easier and cheaper, by allowing the user to take advantage of renewable energy at the lowest prices.

The first « smart island »

The development of the first « smart island » on Porto Santo (Madeira archipelago, Portugal), in partnership with Empresa de Electricidade da Madeira. This smart electric ecosystem is based on four pillars: electric vehicles, static energy storage, smart charging and reversible charging.
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The re-invention of the cities and major metropolises as smart cities rests, according to the Netexplo Observatory, on six pillars: mobility, economy, habitat, governance, citizens and environment/energy.

Renault Group is directly involved in three of these:

  • Habitat, via its domestic energy storage solutions
  • Environment/energy, via smart grids
  • Mobility, via its current offers and the vision revealed by its concept driverless vehicles, the EZ-GO, EZ-PRO and EZ-ULTIMO

In the near future, it is possible to imagine these three pillars merging to create a new urban ecosystem, in which shared mobility solutions will be integrated with the buildings. 

Renault Group is convinced that the future will allow the car and all of the new uses – in terms of mobility and of consumption in general - to live side by side in harmony, in more peaceful, interconnected spaces.

As a partner to smart cities, Renault Group is already helping to build practical solutions that have 3 goals.

Group Renault delivers solutions to these countries, where mobility is synonymous with social challenge

The electric vehicle must become a key component of the new smart electricity grids

First of all, the electric vehicle must become a key component of the new smart electricity grids that will provide cheap, low-carbon electricity. The solutions required are based on real-time storage in batteries: smart charging – which will soon be reversible – of the electric vehicle, and re-use of vehicle batteries for static applications at the end of their useful on-board life.

To encourage the large-scale development of the electric vehicle

The challenge is then to encourage the large-scale development of the electric vehicle. Of course, the natural fall in the cost of owning and using one will contribute to this: a fall that will be encouraged, in particular by the development of solutions available on demand, based on the increasing role of the battery on the electricity grid… And that’s not all. To make the electric vehicle even more popular, Groupe Renault is offering a range of Smartphone apps to make charging easy, in particular when it comes to accessing and paying at public charging terminals throughout Europe.

To promote the emergence of simple and fluid mobility

Finally, Groupe Renault is promoting the emergence of simple and fluid mobility, thanks to autonomous mobility on demand solutions, taxi and ride-hailing services, and car sharing packages… 100%-electric, of course!

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