Project Greenlight: Smart City Challenges
Project Greenlight aims to accelerate the transition to a smart and clean vuture by using challenge-based calls for innovation that enable public and private enterprises to rapidly source, screen and onboard solutions.
Challenge Launch: Fall 2021
Accelerating Smart and Sustainable Transformation for Greater Vancouver
Project Greenlight is part of an overarching strategy to unite the region’s public and private enterprises, enhance Vancouver’s green and smart-city brand, and make a positive economic and environmental impact.
Five Project Greenlight Challenges
Project Greenlight was created by Vancouver Economic Commission (VEC) with founding members FortisBC, TransLink, City of Vancouver, City of New Westminster and QuadReal. With Foresight as the delivery partner, five open and targeted challenges were launched in 2021 with the intention to advance sustainable, smart and digital goals.
1
The City of Vancouver: Fleet, Waste, and Buildings
This challenge supports the City of Vancouver's Greenest City initiative, a bold program aimed at tackling the city's environmental challenges. Although Vancouver is widely recognized as one of the world's most livable cities, its citizens' environmental footprint is currently three times larger than the Earth can sustain.
Challenge Statement: The City of Vancouver sought innovative and novel ideas that address key sustainability and digital priorities. Solutions should have aligned with the strategic priorities outlined below and fall within the areas of transportation, waste/wastewater, rainwater/green infrastructure, buildings, and digital infrastructure. Potential solutions may have included:
- Transportation: Ideas that support the City's goal of achieving zero-emission fleets (medium- to heavy-duty), including solutions to charging infrastructure challenges.
- Zero-Waste: Innovations related to solid waste and organic waste disposal within the urban core.
- Buildings: Solutions that address future low-carbon construction requirements.
2
The City of New Westminster: Intelligent City
New Westminster is developing a growing civic-owned dark-fibre network and pursuing initiatives to create an intelligent and resilient city. Their Intelligent City strategy aims to build the most livable and technologically advanced city in Canada by leveraging technology, partnerships, and acting as a testbed for innovations.
Challenge Statement: This challenge focused on utilizing community assets like the BridgeNet open-access fibre network to foster digital inclusion and innovation. Areas of interest included:
- Digital Government: Enhancing service delivery and intelligent infrastructure.
- Digital Inclusion: Promoting learning, engagement, and digital inclusivity.
- Active Transportation and Arts: Supporting sustainable transportation, arts, culture, and the creative community.
Solutions should have aimed to bring positive and inclusive benefits to the digital economy while building on New Westminster's unique community assets.
3
FortisBC: Drone, AR/VR, ML/AI and EV Charging
FortisBC is pioneering a new approach to energy delivery with one of the most ambitious emissions reduction targets in the Canadian utility sector. Their 30BY30 Target aims to reduce customer GHG emissions by 30% by 2030.
Challenge Statement: The challenge sought innovative solutions to enhance utility maintenance, operations, and safety through technologies such as sensors, AR/VR, AI, and autonomous vehicles/drones. Additionally, it focused on facilitating electric vehicle (EV) adoption by reducing barriers to home charging. Key areas of interest include:
Utility Infrastructure Maintenance and Safety:
- Vegetation Management & Asset Assessments: Utilizing drones, autonomous vehicles, AR/VR, and sensors.
- Worker Safety: Enhancing lone worker safety, preventing vehicle roll-aways, and using wearable tech for safety data analytics.
- Virtual Training: Delivering AR/VR training for gas and electric field workers.
- Remote Work: Increasing remote work capabilities for utility workers.
Electric Vehicle Charging:
- EV Charging Data Analytics: For load identification and disaggregation.
- Off-Grid Charging: Solutions for level 2 and DC fast charging.
- Load Management: Efficient load management for level 2 charging.
- Cost-Effective Home Charging: Both networked and non-networked solutions.
FortisBC’s challenge encourages the development of technologies that will support a sustainable and technologically advanced energy future.
4
The City of Vancouver: Neighbourhood Energy Utility
In Vancouver, buildings are the largest source of carbon pollution, with nearly 55% of community greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions coming from natural gas used for heating and hot water. The City’s Climate Emergency Action Plan targets a 50% reduction in carbon pollution from buildings by 2030.
Challenge Statement: The City-owned Neighbourhood Energy Utility (NEU) provides low-carbon heating and hot water to 38 buildings in False Creek. Established in 2010, the NEU uses innovative sewage waste heat recovery, clean electricity, and renewable natural gas, aiming for a 70% renewable energy supply. The system is projected to triple in size over the next 20 years. Under the Climate Emergency Action Plan, the NEU is developing a 100% Renewable Energy (RE) Roadmap, to be approved by City Council in 2023, targeting a complete transition to renewable energy by 2030.
The City sought innovative solutions to transition the NEU to 100% renewable energy by 2030, compatible with existing system conditions.
Areas of Interest:
- Low-Carbon Heat Production: New technologies for low-carbon heat generation and optimization.
- Energy Efficiency: Solutions for demand-side management and increased energy efficiency.
- Operational Efficiency: Innovations to enhance the operational efficiency of the NEU.
Solutions could have been incremental, phased, or holistic, and included distributed or centralised approaches. Single or complementary solutions were welcomed.
This challenge encouraged the development of diverse, innovative technologies to support Vancouver’s transition to a sustainable, renewable energy future.
5
The City of Vancouver: Smart GRI Monitoring
Rain events in Vancouver increasingly overwhelm the sewer and storm pipe systems, leading to overflows of polluted urban runoff and untreated sewage into oceans and waterways. The City of Vancouver has a regulatory requirement to address these water quality issues from combined sewer overflows and contaminated stormwater.
The Rain City Strategy aims to manage rainwater runoff from 40% of impervious areas by 2050. With city streets making up 19% of these areas and producing the most runoff pollutants, Vancouver is implementing green rainwater infrastructure (GRI) such as bioretention corner bulges, permeable pavements, rainwater tree trenches, and infiltration trenches. Currently, a few hundred GRI assets exist, but thousands are needed to meet the 2050 target.
Challenge Statement: The City sought innovative smart tech monitoring solutions for GRI to provide real-time system performance data and maintenance trigger data at lower costs.
Desired Outcomes:
- Reliable Data: Solutions should provide data on the compliance and performance of GRI, including water retention and pollutant removal percentages.
- Ease of Implementation: Solutions should be easy to implement and facilitate data collection, potentially leveraging citizen science.
- Efficiency: Solutions should reduce staff time for data collection and analysis.
- Real-Time Maintenance: Solutions should provide real-time information on maintenance needs, optimizing maintenance schedules and asset management.
- Flexibility: Solutions should be easily transferable between sites as monitoring needs change.
Challenge Winner:
Novion won this this Challenge for their asset assessment services and resource management platform that helps organizations and cities better understand and manage how they’re using water.
Outcomes:
In 2022, the City of Vancouver launched a pilot project with Novion to remotely monitor the performance of several green infrastructure sites across the city. The infiltration rates of each site were monitored using water level sensors connected to Novion's proprietary IoT enabled Data Loggers and real-time insights were generated through Novion's Climate Intelligence Platform.
The objective of the monitoring program is to inform decisions on future planning, compliance, design optimization, and maintenance.
Our Partners
We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Province of British Columbia through the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation as well as support from Pacific Economic Development Canada.
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