On April 29th, ICARE Clean and Renewable Energy Lecture Series “Smart Grid and the future of Smarter, Greener Cities” was held. The conference, hosted by ICARE international student Mr. Gabriel Murillo Morales, was given by Mr. Patrick Schuler, the founder of SmartEcoCity in China and the chairman Smart Grid at the European Chamber of Commerce in Beijing. More than 60 students and teachers attended the lecture.

Mr. Schuler holds a engineering master degree from the higher engineering school ESIEE Paris and has more than a decade of working experience at Hewlett-Packard in Germany, SIEMENS in the US and ALSTOM in China. In 2012, Mr. Schuler founded SmartEcoCity contributing to the development of low carbon urban development in China and supporting top entrepreneurs build leading green smart-ups. He is currently responsible in Asia for the portfolio of Idinvest Partners and EDF.

At the beginning of his talk, Mr. Schuler introduced the SmartEcoCity in China that he founded and Idinvest Partners which is the investor of this company. He said that Smart Grid is fundamentally important for the modernization of gridsto satisfy the growing demand: renewable, intermittent, and distributed generation, green building, e-mobility and environmental pressures, and so on. Smart Grid is also an integral part of this ICT (Information and Communications Technologytransformation. But as in all transformations, besides opportunities, there are challenges mainly: maintain grid reliability and stability, improve energy efficiency across the value chain and integrate intermittent CO2 free energy. Smart grid could be an answer for all three.

Then on the base of smart grid system, Mr. Schuler explained the Smart City concept. He said that, developing Smart City needs to build smart infrastructures, introduce virtual energy community management and deregulation & real-time pricing, most importantly, solve increased energy density during peaks and guide consumers turning to “prosumers”.

In the end, he reviewed several Smart Grid/City projects and put forward his ideas, a concept including smart house, smart building, smart neighborhood, smart district, and even smart city.