The list of smart city initiatives continues to grow.  Recent examples include the new EU smart city project fund; almost 400 U.S. cities competing for $9 million in awards for city innovation as part of the Mayors Challenge launched by Bloomberg Philanthropies; a £25 million ($40 million) Future Cities Demonstrator competition for cities in the United Kingdom; and a new smart cities network formed by 24 Spanish cities.  One of the most interesting new programs was launched in Barcelona in July.  The first City Protocol workshop, co-hosted by the City of Barcelona, GDF Suez and Cisco, brought together a diverse group of stakeholders including city councils, academia, suppliers and interest groups, all committed to the development of a “more sustainable, efficient, cohesive, innovative and smart city.”  Over 30 cities from across the world were represented, as well as around 20 suppliers, including Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Telefonica, and Philips.

The City Protocol aims to enable cities that are “adaptive, learning, evolving, robust, autonomous, self-repairing, and self-reproducing.” The Protocol spans the whole of the city ecosystem including water, waste, matter, energy and utilities, mobility, goods, people, and information.  Taking its inspiration from the way Internet and Web standards have been delivered, it fosters a similar process of open, transparent, and robust collaboration on an international basis.  Leadership will be provided by the City Protocol Society (CPS), which will loosely follow the model of the The Internet Society,  addressing specific issues and delivering formal agreements, recommendations, technology standards, reference projects, policies, and certification models.

Of course, there are already many collaborative efforts on city innovation that focus on developing innovative solutions to common challenges.  The danger is that the City Protocol will be just another talking-shop on the fascinating challenges of urban renewal and growth.  There are two critical areas where it could make a real difference.

‘Anything Connected to Anything’

First, a well-defined and shared process for the ratification, incorporation, and further development of technology standards that meet the needs of smart cities would be a major step forward.  The City Protocol could make a significant contribution to enabling better integration of information flows and communications networks across multiple domains such as transport, sustainability, and public safety, for example.  This would make analogies to the Internet Protocol or to concepts such as the Smart City Operating System more than just metaphors.  Vint Cerf, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, told delegates to the first City Protocol Workshop that one of the biggest insights of the Internet’s early development was that eventual applications were less important than simply creating a platform where an arbitrary collection of computers could communicate over an arbitrary collection of networks.  Tim Berners-Lee had a similar vision for the World Wide Web: “Anything being potentially connected to anything.”  If the City Protocol can help develop a similar approach to connectivity across the diversity and complexity of urban operations, then it will be a major achievement.

However, the need to address practical issues around specific application areas is where the City Protocol most clearly diverges from the Internet Protocol.  This is also where its second major contribution can be made.  Participants in the City Protocol workshop recognized the need for better cost-benefit analyses that can reduce the risk and improve the repeatability of new programs in areas such as energy efficiency.  If the public and private sector can develop models for delivering financial returns and public benefits on energy efficiency programs or better managed transportation systems, for example, then it will be much easier to implement such smart city projects at scale.

It’s always interesting to see a project you’ve been tracking for some time come to fruition.  I’ve been following Verne Global, and its plans for a data center campus in Iceland, for almost two years, so it was rewarding to see its progress first-hand at the official launch event last month.

The Verne Global data center is based on a former NATO facility west of Reykjavik, near Keflavik International Airport.  Iceland’s advantages as a staging post between North America and Europe are important, but it’s the availability of a dual-sourced renewable energy supply that makes the project unique.  Iceland’s electricity is provided 100% by hydropower and geothermal energy.  In addition, Iceland’s temperate climate enables year round free air cooling without the need for chillers, helping the site to operate at a power usage effectiveness (PUE, a measure of how efficiently a data center uses energy) of around 1.2.

The data center’s location provides strong green credentials, but it also offers important commercial advantages.  Iceland’s renewable energy resources mean a stable and cheap source of electricity for data center operators and other businesses.  Landsvirkjun, the local utility, is able to offer up to 20-year terms for electricity rates and has, for example, been offering a public rate of $43 per megawatt for 12 years.  This allows Verne Global to claim that the total TCO for its customers could be 60% lower than a similar deployment in London.

The choice of location has been combined with an innovative approach to data center development through a close partnership with Colt.  I’ve written previously about Colt’s approach to modular data center design, and the Keflavik data center is its first public showcase, though it has since announced another data center customer in UK luxury car maker Jaguar Land Rover.  The partnership with Verne Global also involves Colt installing a new point-of-presence (POP) for its Pan-European communications network within the facility.  Having had a chance to see the actual data center and talk to Colt’s engineering and management team, I understand more clearly how far its offering differs from containerized approaches to modular design.  “Pre-fabricated data centers” is perhaps a better term for what Colt is doing, building the components at its factory in the north of England and shipping them for rapid installation on-site.  Colt’s approach is also modular in that it supports an incremental build-out of the data center in 500 square-meter units, which is also helping Verne Global manage its capital investment.

Another key stakeholder in this venture is the Icelandic government.  During the launch, the local mayor and an Icelandic government minister gave speeches that showed their clear enthusiasm for the project.  Iceland is keen to exploit its natural advantages to develop a large-scale data center industry and has been clearing away regulatory and tax issues that might hamper expansion of the sector.  Iceland, of course, was one of the countries most badly hit by the banking crisis and it is now betting on data centers as a more stable basis for the future growth.  The availability of the new Emerald Express Trans-Atlantic Cable System, a 5,200 km ultra-high bandwidth link between the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Iceland, planned for late 2012, will help Iceland and Verne Global better target U.S. data center business.

Today, Iceland’s energy surplus supports a power-hungry aluminum smelting industry.  The government hopes that in future, processing bits may be equally important to the island’s economy.

Using a public cellular network for managing smart meters got a big boost last September when Michigan utility Consumers Energy chose SmartSynch to provide the new advanced system for its 1.8 million electric customers. The partners in this project were announced recently, and one of them is Grid Net – a San Francisco-based startup and a champion of cellular-based technology for utilities.

Grid Net has been hanging around this space for several years, but without a major U.S. win to build upon – until now.  As part of SmartSynch’s team, Grid Net’s software will be a key component of this deployment.

The other partners in this project besides Grid Net include:

• GE Energy – which will provide the meters themselves
• Qualcomm – which will provide the broadband chipsets that enable cellular connectivity in the meters
• Verizon Wireless – which will provide the communications network

Soon after the partners were announced, I spoke with Scott Truitt, Grid Net’s marketing director, who told me why he thinks his company’s machine-to-machine network operating system is superior to mesh-based systems:

• Flexibility that allows for either gradual deployments of devices and applications or full rollouts, depending on a utility’s needs
• More robust communications over cellular networks than mesh can provide
• Greater intelligence on every device in the system, not just at the head-end
• Higher value applications for advanced metering (AMI), demand response load control (DRLC), distribution monitoring and control (DM&C) and premise area networking (PAN)
• Comprehensive security throughout the system that is government-grade and not a partial solution

Truitt also mentioned this won’t be the first big rollout for Grid Net.  The company is already part of a similarly large AMI deployment in Australia by Ausgrid, which is rolling out 1.6 million meters and using a 3G-4G cellular network.  Grid Net has also been involved in a separate utility deployment in Australia with SP AusNet, and is taking part in two other trials in that country.  But clearly, the Consumers Energy deal is a defining achievement for Grid Net in the U.S. market.  The first meters are scheduled for installment in August 2012, with a phased approach through 2019.

As a side note to this project, there is a reasonable chance another meter manufacturer could enter the picture in addition to GE Energy, given two factors: one, the length of deployment over seven years, which is plenty of time for Consumers to warm up to a different vendor (or two) later on, and the fact that SmartSynch itself has been acquired recently by meter-maker Itron.  Just speculation at this point, of course, but it should surprise no one if Itron meters are eventually involved.

The bigger question is how this deployment proceeds for Grid Net and its partners.  Competitors will be tuned in to see if a large-scale residential deployment over public cellular can muscle in on the traditional mesh turf.  My hunch is this will succeed.  Consumers is a smart utility and has no doubt done its homework.  Partners Qualcomm and Verizon are solid as well.  All will have to execute to prove their worth in the smart grid market.

What do you think?  Submit a comment below to let me know your thoughts on how viable cellular networks are (or are not) for major residential smart grid deployments.