Do you know eCity Seville? According to numerous sociological studies, 60% of the world's population will live in cities by 2025, which translates into 4.5 billion people. This exponential growth puts great pressure on the planning of our cities and transportation systems.

Population growth in cities will result in a parallel excess of traffic, which will have an even greater negative impact on pollution that is already the case.

To stop this, the capital of Seville has been working for several years on a sustainable development project for the city, eCity Seville, which aims to transform the concept of urban mobility.

Meep will tell you everything you need to know about the eCity Seville initiative. Stay with us!

What is eCity Sevilla?

It is an initiative led by the Regional Government of Andalusia, the Seville City Council, the Cartuja Science and Technology Park (PCT Cartuja) and Endesa, which has already been joined by different institutions. These adherent partners to eCity Seville have their headquarters or develop an economic activity in the PCT Cartuja, as this characteristic is a prerequisite to be part of the program.

eCity Seville is a pioneering public-private collaboration project in Spain. It aims to achieve a city model following the characteristics of an open, digital, decarbonized and sustainable ecosystem by 2025.

The aim of this eCity Seville initiative is to ensure that Isla de la Cartuja (Seville) leads the way for sustainable cities of the future, becoming a benchmark for urban energy transition to be imitated internationally.

Isla de la Cartuja occupies around 500 acres, where 523 companies and approximately 23,000 people work. This makes it the ideal place to become a 100% energy self-sufficient and emission-free Smart City. To this end, this project will pay special attention to sustainable mobility, digitalization and energy supply.

Do you want to join eCity Seville? Find out about the requirements to participate in this initiative and fill in the application form through this contact.

Fundamental pillars on which eCity Seville is based

Over the next four years, five working groups will develop strategies for each of the project's pillars:

• Energy
• Sustainable mobility
• Edification
• Digitization and communication and participation

New technology and digitalization

The development of a smart grid is essential to connect all the infrastructures included in this project. These grids not only enable new shared uses of energy, but also allow a higher degree of automation and control. They are also capable of integrating local renewable and distributed energy generation and implementing new business models associated with this energy model.

All this, together with the commitment to digitalization throughout the environment, will make it possible to have an open data system to capture information, exchange it and analyze it with advanced technologies. This will build a model that can be used internationally through a platform (based on Fiware developments) enabled for this purpose.

Sustainable mobility

In terms of mobility, we will move towards pedestrianization models, mainly to promote electric vehicles. The aim is to achieve a sustainable vehicle fleet.

Thus, as an initial objective, we will work on the renewal of about 2,000 vehicles replaced by electric vehicles and about 200 recharging points distributed in the fleet before 2025.

The development of a Smart Parking model in the perimeter area of Isla de la Cartuja will also be another project to be carried out and will be connected by emission-free shuttles throughout the area.

Intelligent buildings

The proposal is to carry out an energy rehabilitation process in the main buildings of the park (with the implementation of 2 MWp of photovoltaic installations in self-consumption regime).

This will be done in the 50 buildings with the highest energy consumption and the rest of the buildings will be invited to join this challenge to reduce their current consumption by 35%. The resulting final demand will be supplied by renewable energy sources, mostly of photovoltaic origin produced within the island's own premises.

This will make it possible to achieve a high degree of energy self-sufficiency in an almost isolated system.

Energy

eCity Seville envisions that by 2025 the Cartuja will produce and consume 100% renewable energy based on distributed energy resources.

The lines of action to be followed include:

• Developing self-consumption and photovoltaic generation at the Cartuja site
• Transforming the current electrical grid of the future eCity Seville into an intelligent grid capable of integrating distributed resources
• Design and implement business models, under an ecosystem of distributed energy resources
• In this way, Isla de la Cartuja will be 100% renewable, and Endesa will be in charge of achieving this, leading this first working group

Communication and participation

Giving voice and promoting the communication of the project's progress is of vital importance for eCity Seville. The worldwide visibility that is intended to give the program has to be in a unified and consistent way, and media in which the news are spread and the adhering entities, have to follow the same line to have a good projection.

Content and uniform digital commnunication is very importnt for the project. Some of them are: the website itself (driven by the PCT Cartuja), the issuance of monthly Newsletter, and content on social networks through the hashtag #eCitySevilla.

Once these lines of work have been developed, in 2025, Isla de la Cartuja will enjoy a 100% renewable energy supply, will have efficient buildings, recharging points will be deployed to promote sustainable electric mobility, and all of this will operate with a connected and autonomous system, connected to a fully digitalised Smart Grid, which will also enable an open data platform for the intelligent management of the park.

How does Meep promote sustainable mobility in the Cartuja area?

Meep, together with Ciclogreen, aims to do its bit in the eCity Seville project, and thus help propel sustainable mobility on the island. Both startups, along with some companies participating in the project, join forces to promote sustainable mobility of its partners in terms of arrival and departure to the island, and the movement of these within the park.

This is a project with challenges that are part of the activities of the eCity Seville program and are in line with its objectives of making PCT Cartuja a decarbonized, sustainable and innovative environment by 2025. It was proposed last year and, after its incredible performance, it has been repeated again in 2022 with the addition of at least two more companies.

The II MaaS eCitySevilla Challenge encourages people to go to work in a sustainable way and transforms miles into gifts as an incentive. Fantastic prizes can be won by accumulating Cycles (points) for every kilometer traveled in a sustainable way on your commute to and from work.

This is the first time that the Seville Technology Park has promoted an initiative of this kind in an area where the private car is the most common transport method used by students and employees who come to PCT Cartuja on a daily basis. In fact, mobility has been the Achilles heel of the island for years and an improvement was urgently needed.

We can say that all this is an example of sustainability with the implementation of the eCity Seville initiative and other actions carried out for the integration of new technologies to manage the city's mobility services in a sustainable and responsible way.

Thanks to Meep, Seville has become the first Andalusian city to offer its citizens a digital application that integrates its various transport services.

If you want to know more, do not hesitate to contact Meep and read our blog, together we will achieve a greener mobility in our cities!