Energy ecosystem in smart cities — Privacy and security solutions for citizen's engagement in a multi-stream environment

Smart city concepts essentially rely on energy aspects. This paper emphasizes the main issues to be solved in the energy domain and suggests solutions based on authors' experience in projects related to energy management in cities. We are basically addressing two main aspects of Smart City implementation: a) multi-energy streams when different utilities serve different energy networks in the city (electricity, gas, and heat) and b) the issue of engaging the citizens by sharing their private energy data profile, as an alternative to implementations which fail to advance from small pilots to large deployments. We propose architectures in progress to be implemented in a H2020 project which deals with municipality owned utility in Terni/Italy. Our proposals consider privacy rights according to EU laws and recommendations, data access rights according to national rules as well as empowerment of people which are supported with additional energy services by the municipality. This approach is aimed at high citizen engagement and enabling hierarchical / multi-energy systems optimization with the support from municipalities, thus enabling sustainability within Smart Cities.