Enhancing environmental control and reducing emissions in Nordic Smart Cities

Municipalities and public institutions are concerned about air, water, noise or lighting pollution in cities. In the last years, it has become mandatory through several international regulations to reduce emissions that could impact in the environment and also inhabitants lives. Being a Smart City is more than just a trend, is a commitment with society and stakeholders.

Carbon Track and Trace Project (CTT) aim is reducing CO2 emissions, combating climate change in cities and also developing a decision support system for cities greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions monitoring. It was funded by the Low Carbon City Lab flagship of the EU Climate KIC programme.

Trondheim (Norway) and Vejle (Denmark)

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has led this project based on wireless sensor networks with Libelium Waspmote Sensor Platform. The Smart City plan has been deployed in two Nordic municipalities as test beds: Trondheim (Norway) and Vejle (Denmark).

GHG emissions monitoring and reporting

The first stage of CTT project revealed a significant gap between Norwegian municipalities’ current methodologies and official standards for greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) monitoring and reporting. This difference was also detected in worldwide cities. Current phase, CTT 2.0, has focused on developing an automated system for GHG emissions monitoring and reporting, through the use of bottom-up sensor-based measurements.

Technician installing sensor nodes in Vejle

Technicians have chosen Libelium open-source hardware and sensor technology to develop this real-time monitoring system. The factors that have motivated are the following:

• Ease of use
• Availability of calibrated sensors
• Compatibility with LoRaWAN
• Weather proof enclosure for the technology
• Encapsuled versions with easy deployment

Wireless sensor networks deployed in Trondheim and Vejle are based in Plug & Sense! Smart Environment PRO, a platform that features maximum performance sensors for metering that require accurate ppm or percentage and are able to read up to 16 gas sensors. For this deployment the sensors installed have been: carbon dioxide (CO₂), nitric oxide (NO), particle matter – dust (PM1, PM2.5 and PM10), temperature, pressure and humidity.

CTT2.0 automated system for emissions monitoring

Communication between Waspmote Plug & Sense! nodes and gateways is done through LoRaWAN, while the gateways communicate with the cloud through a common Ethernet wiring. CTT2.0 currently uses The Things Network as a cloud backend which is an open-source community aimed at creating a global IoT network based on LoRaWAN.

CTT Urban Overview giving information from a node deployed in Vejle

The application developed to visualize data is CTT Urban Overview that allows monitoring the network itself and also data analysis. Data is taken from sensors nodes as well as external information sources and is used to analyze and calibrate the measurements and conflate them to build a detailed overview of emissions in the city.

Useful information for citizens