Smartcity Málaga

Imagine a real place in which you can create, validate and test innovation projects in a distributed generation and telecommunications environment quickly and safely. This place exists. This is the Living Lab of Smartcity Malaga, an ecosystem of innovation we have developed to experiment on the solutions that will be used to build the cities of the future.

Since it was rolled out in 2009, Smartcity Málaga has been a real laboratory in which efficiency, energy saving and active demand management measures have been developed for households, buildings and big accounts. In addition, this space works on the improvement of the integration of the renewable energy generation network with the grid, storage, electric mobility, Remote Management services and information security. All of these technologies associated with smart grids will be needed in the energy transition to a zero-emission model.

Seeking for the smart city model

The Living Lab Smartcity of Málaga covers an area of the city that includes 11,000 household customers and 1,200 companies. Only during its first five years, the innovations implemented by the project resulted in savings of over 25% of the consumption of electricity and a 20% reduction of the CO2 emissions. In addition, 15% of the consumption of the area was covered thanks to the distributed generation obtained from renewable energy.

Very important projects, such as MONICA, PALOMA, Flexiciency and Smart Terminal, are being carried out in this laboratory. All of them are aimed at seeking for improvements in the current grid. Likewise, the low and medium-voltage distribution grids will be controlled and monitored, the grid energy losses will be studied and the impact of electric buses on the low-voltage grids will be studied. In addition, a micro-grid has been integrated in the promenade of Malaga thanks to these projects, which will be used to manage and study everything associated with the generation, storage and consumption of energy.