Scottish Cities Alliance

The Alliance at All-Energy

The Scottish Cities Alliance is attending All-Energy, the UK’s largest renewable energy event, this Wednesday and Thursday (10th & 11th May) in Glasgow’s SEC.

All-Energy gives the professionals in the renewable energy supply chain the chance to make new connections and expand business networks in this fast-changing marketplace.
The event features areas such as energy storage, heat, low carbon transport and sustainable cities solutions – the Alliance will feature its low carbon, hydrogen and Smart Cities workstreams.

We’ll be on Glasgow City Council’s stand at C20, so come along and find out more about how the Scottish Cities Alliance is looking to make our cities greener and more efficient.

Hydrogen

The Scottish Cities Alliance – in partnership with Aberdeen and Dundee City Councils – is participating in the EU Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking Initiative (FCH-JU) to accelerate the deployment of hydrogen fuel cell buses and hydrogen refuelling infrastructure across European cities to commercialise the technology in the 2020s. This is the most ambitious FCH-JU initiative to-date, deploying hundreds of fuel cell buses and the associated refuelling infrastructure across European cities over the next few years.

The first of these projects known as JIVE (Joint Initiative for Hydrogen Vehicles across Europe) was awarded funding in late 2016 for the deployment of around 140 fuel cell buses across several European cities.

Linked to the large-scale deployment of hydrogen fuel cell buses, the Alliance is looking at the development of hydrogen refuelling station infrastructure across the cities, and the production of green hydrogen. This will allow Scotland to position itself as one of Europe’s leading early adopters of hydrogen technology and attract investment into sectors such as manufacturing, engineering, energy and commercialisation of the technology.

Zero emission hydrogen buses also contribute to Scotland achieving its challenging climate change targets, as well as improving local air quality and clean travel within our cities/regions.

For further information on this project please visit fch.europa.eu

Low Carbon

The Scottish Cities Alliance aims to drive forward the agenda for a low carbon future to improve services, help lessen the impact of climate change and ensure the future economic prosperity of Scotland.

The Alliance aims to support Scotland’s transition to a low carbon economy by working with the cities to determine the priority areas for low carbon action. The Low Carbon Resilient Cities Report 2015 outlines opportunities for all cities, including direct economic benefits such as the creation of 21,000 full-time jobs, Gross Value Added (GVA) worth £1billion and economic investment worth £2.9billion. The Alliance is working with all seven cities following the report’s findings which focus on large scale energy efficiency retrofit and low carbon heat by exploring mechanism such as the Non Domestic Energy Efficiency Framework and Scotland’s Energy Efficiency Programme to develop and deliver projects to tackle these topics.

The Alliance is working on the development of the circular economy in the cities with projects including the identification of opportunities for the local business base and cross city collaborations to gain added value from municipally collected waste stream through the assessment of biorefining opportunities. These projects will support the transformation of the cities into world leading sustainable cities to enable them to become more internationally competitive and boost economic growth.

Smart Cities

Graham Pinfield, Smart Perth Project Officer for Perth and Kinross Council will be speaking at the Sustainable and smart cities: Challenges, opportunities and solutions session at All-Energy on Wednesday afternoon.

He will speak about the Scottish Cities Alliance’s core programmes and the Smart Cities Scotland activity which demonstrates how, through working together, Scotland’s cities and the Scottish Government have been able to assist each to demonstrate the potential for data and technology to transform cities, improve services and grow the economy. This includes projects such as Intelligent Street Lighting, City Operations Centres, Smart Waste, Open Data and other initiatives making life in the city safer, smarter and more sustainable.

For more information on any of the Alliance’s workstreams visit www.scottishcities.org.uk