Petteri Huuska
City of Helsinki
For the past 11 years, Petteri Huuska has been an environmental planner in City of Helsinki Environmental Services. He is an expert in climate mitigation and environmental statistics of Helsinki. He has been involved in several EU-projects, like ICLEI’s URBAN Leds and ongoing mySMARTLife-project. Recently he has been preparing Helsinki’s Climate neutrality plan with his climate team. He is a coordinator in the Energy and Climate Atlas of Helsinki, which was recently opened in Helsinki’s 3D City Model. He is also an editor in Helsinki’s Climate Mitigation and Adaptation www-pages and a newsletter, see www.stadinilmasto.fi
Helsinki joined the cluster of Lighthouse cities as part of the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme in the project mySMARTLife which brings forward new and innovative urban energy solutions and numerous pilots within the framework to commercial scale. The overall objective is to lower CO2 emissions considerably and show how cities take responsibility as forerunners in mitigating climate change. The Lighthouse cities are Hamburg, Helsinki and Nantes with four fellow cities of Bydgoszcz, Palencia, Rijeka and Varna. Actions are divided into four categories: energy efficient buildings, smart mobility, city infrastructures and non-technical such as supportive ICT/IoT solutions. The foremost challenge in reducing emissions and biggest potential for energy savings is renovation of existing buildings. ICT can be harnessed to serve this purpose efficiently.
Helsinki is recognized as one of the leading cities in open data and the Helsinki Region Infoshare has currently over 600 data sets in 12 categories ranging from health, economy and environment to city planning and real estate. With the recently opened energy data the 3D City Model and its Energy and Climate Atlas is an incentive to boost energy efficiency measures.
The Atlas contains both real and calculated building-specific data. The information includes energy-efficiency upgrades, performance classifications, and the energy sources used for heating – whether the building utilizes district heating, geothermal energy, electricity or other. The atlas also shows energy consumption of buildings as estimated by the Technical Research Centre of Finland VTT. Further, the atlas presents the calculated data available on buildings performance provided by Helsinki Regional Environment Services HSY and, for example, building-specific solar energy potential.
The Energy and Climate Atlas has been executed with the CityGML city information model, which can be used for advanced city analyses and simulations. The atlas covers the entire city, so it enables an easy citywide energy survey, as well as assessments of specific buildings. In accordance with Helsinki’s principles concerning public data, all data presented on the 3D model is released as open data available freely and equally for new knowledge and service development as well as a tool for city planners and decision-makers to assess the potential and available resources for energy efficiency improvements. Property owners and managers can use the atlas to assess the property’s energy consumption.
The development of Energy and Climate Atlas on the 3D city information model continues. Plans for new datasets involve the thermal imaging of mySMARTLife project area and geothermal energy potential of buildings. Advanced 3D models can be used to predict various scenarios to help in preparing to face the challenges in measures to adapt to climate change, for example, in the management of flooding caused by heavy rainfall.
One of the main areas for mySMARTLife Helsinki is Kalasatama, a brownfield district in Helsinki and a vivid smart city experimental innovation platform to co-create smart and clean urban infrastructure and services. Development is carried out flexibly and through piloting, in close co-operation with 200+ stakeholders including residents, companies, city officials and researchers. The next development step for the open 3D city model will be to make digital twin city model of Kalasatama area, visualizing other smart city data, in a similar manner as in the Energy and Climate Atlas.
