Utilities play a unique role in communications infrastructure and have had a long-standing impact on their communities through innovation.

In Colorado Springs, the municipality-owned utility company is heavily engaged in smart city efforts. Colorado Springs Utilities is partnering with the city to develop an advanced metering system that is future proof, enlisting Panasonic’s leadership in both global smart city initiatives and specialty sensors, to collaborate on an implementation strategy that taps integrated technology and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Itron, known for innovating the way utilities and cities manage energy and water, has achieved success working with cities and utility companies to deploy network infrastructure that can be shared to manage streetlights, find water and methane leaks and usage anomalies, detect and locate gunshots and more. Harnessing the power of IoT, utilities can monitor conditions in real time, while cities and the people living in them benefit from real-time information and the ability to make decisions based on data.

At the heart of smart cities is data, and the equipment, such as sensors, that constantly generate data streams and serve them up across the network for consumption. As urban areas and companies collaborate to deploy IoT technology and leverage data for a range of city services, they face inherent challenges, from increasing costs, siloed city departments and technical complexities. A recent study on disruptive technology by Panasonic found that as organizations adopt next-gen tech, there are additional obstacles including a lack of skilled employees and lack of expertise for effective implementation. In fact, half of the companies surveyed believe they might need a partner to guide them on how best to adopt and integrate these solutions into their business.

Here are four best practices that Panasonic and Itron have learned from real-world experience, that help cities work smarter, not harder:

1. Integrate technology

When you’re leveraging disruptive technologies, such as specialized sensors, data storage and face the challenges brought on by the Internet of Things (IoT), there’s a very real need to integrate these technologies into a unified, standard, simple and secure platform with a rich ecosystem.  

City departments responsible for services such as lighting, traffic or transportation are often siloed with no mechanism for cross-department collaboration. Creating a shared network infrastructure enables these groups to leverage resources to increase efficiency, reduce cost and provide better services.

Cities like Glasgow are meeting their objectives by integrating multiple city services on a common platform, using one network canopy for several applications. Bringing data from many devices onto a common platform enables new approaches in distributed intelligence and real time analytics. 

2. Leverage data 

All the information and insights being collected by all those sensors is only valuable if its actionable. Successful smart city initiatives typically determine what value will be derived from the data, whether public or private, which data should be open, and how the data is to be managed and governed. 

In many cases, it can make sense to promote an open data platform. Social media is connecting city leaders to its citizens more than ever. Many cities are looking to share data sets from across the city with individuals, businesses and research facilities to help improve quality of life and foster innovation.

Create a culture that encourages developers. It’s hard to predict what the ‘killer apps’ that improve city services will be. Success will require building an ecosystem of developers leveraging open standards and nurturing their ability to disrupt.

3. Ensure reliability 

Conduct due diligence to research and select a smart grid/smart city technology partner. Set specific benchmarks and overall deployment goals to ensure technology will meet your needs.
Make sure to look for standard, secured, reliable and mature solutions.

To ensure fast results, begin with low-risk/high-return projects, such as networked LED street lighting, to quickly demonstrate public safety and operational benefits. Your community will instantly see the difference with better and more reliable street lighting, and you get immediate ROI with lower energy usage and drastically reduced maintenance.

4. Engage the community 

Community engagement is invaluable to a smart city initiative. Involve citizens from the start and empower local businesses and innovators to get involved by holding town hall sessions and leveraging social media. Publicize concrete statistics that demonstrate the success of your project along the way, such as operational savings, reduced energy needs and improved customer satisfaction.

In Colorado Springs, city officials initiated open discussions with the community via a live web link that enables citizens to provide feedback on what they would like to see in areas like smart mobility, sustainability and other city services. Creating an ongoing dialogue with the public creates a sense of ownership within the community, keeping leaders focused on projects that will improve the lives of citizens.

As anyone in the tech world understands, disruption is the new normal. Constant innovation is now the price of entry, and the rate of change is increasing exponentially. Adoption rates have also accelerated dramatically. As inventor and futurist and Ray Kurzweil noted, we won’t experience 100 years of progress in this century – at today’s accelerated pace, it will be more like 20,000 years worth.

In our recent “Moving Forward,” research series, Panasonic Corp. of North America assesses how senior technology decision makers in industries including automotive view the technologies they see driving us forward, and the impact of these technologies on future plans. By 2025, 10 disruptive technologies are expected to generate trillions of dollars of economic impact. Our new research reveals that tech decision makers in automotive, avionics industries and related government agencies say their companies have already adopted five of these technologies on average. And four have risen to the top of their innovation agendas – energy storage, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and sustainable energy. Panasonic is deeply engaged in all of them.

There has been a great deal of prototyping and testing of Intelligent Transportation Systems, but working with the Colorado Dept. of Transportation, Panasonic has developed a phased approach that will allow DOTs to effectively deploy these technologies at scale. Not just a system for main highways and thoroughfares, but for all roadways and arteries throughout an entire state or region.

Our role? A technology-agnostic strategic consultant, general contractor and solution integrator.

We’re one year into our real-world deployment along a particularly challenging 90 mile stretch of I-70 in Colorado, connecting Denver to Vail, where Coloradans face steep grades, severe curves, often-extreme weather, visibility and congestion difficulties. This is a 5-year, $72 million V2X program featuring a road-operator managed data platform deployed on active, open roadways.

With our Intelligent Transportation solution, we’re talking about empowering DOTs with the ability to analyze everything from speed and heading, to windshield wiper and traction control status – providing valuable context on road conditions.

Suddenly, a roadway operator can receive this data and make up-to-the-minute decisions about deploying snowplows during winter storms – or optimize how traffic flows through the city in real time.

This technology can also communicate instantly about emergency braking and crashes, and enables customized alerts to be sent to cars in specific locations instantaneously.

Imagine driving along the highway in the mountains and a crash occurs 1,000 feet down the road and around a blind turn. V2X will enable our vehicles to warn us or even react on our behalf – to prevent us from becoming a part of the incident even before the compromised vehicle is visible. And emergency services can be deployed more expeditiously, and more cost-effectively, than ever before.

Connected vehicle technology will save lives through a significant reduction in the number of non-impaired crashes – estimates are as high as 80%. CDOT estimates as much as a 400% increase in roadway efficiency with wide scale deployment of connected vehicle technology – without the expense of widening roadways and adding lanes. The system is also expected to reduce the amount of time people spend in traffic and lessen the environmental impact of idling cars by mitigating congestion.

Read more about how disruptive technology is impacting transportation in The Year of the Smart Highway.