30 Oct 2019 — During the kick-off meeting partners where asked to brain-storm around POCITYF to create a word cloud. This story is the result of combining all the words. Enjoy the reading!
The year, 2050
There’s no such relaxing thing as concluding a day with an enjoyable jog in my neighbourhood. Sun is beginning to fall and street lights seem to be escorting me, by adjusting their brightness accordingly to my steps.
Navigating throughout these flourishing green streets I recall the days when I had to increase music volume in order to not to hear the hundreds of cars that used to occupy almost all this space. Now, electric vehicles circulate as smooth as silk. It’s funny thou, to think that cities used to be designed while taking cars in such a high consideration, and not in a deep citizen-centric way, like now. Thinking about this, tomorrow morning I’ll need to check my office’s smart management system to see if my EV will be sufficiently charged to leave for that meeting at 3 pm. Well, with the amount of incorporated BIPV, I would be very surprised if it ain’t. Also, the surrounding heritage municipal buildings are already part of the district P2P energy market, so, it should be fine.
That trading scheme has really empowered citizens: I heard that a new record on the attained aggregated residential energy savings and flexibility was attained last month two blocks away. Besides the obvious advantage in CO2 reduction for the whole city, they had new revenue streams by providing services to the grid – inspiring to see how the smart grid applications have evolved.
Well, everything has evolved quite fast actually. I remember the days when I was participating in consortiums of 46 partners, with 89 persons in a room only to figure it out how to have positive energy areas. Innovation has indeed steered us towards fully sustainable cities in the meantime, to which money from EU was rather instrumental.
We now live in cities positive in every sense.
