WP 5 - Replication

The City of Espoo has 5 city centres instead of the traditional one. This provides the city with wider opportunities for sustainable city development. Espoo is also one of the fastest-growing cities in Finland, and this is pushing the city and its stakeholders to work harder for sustainable solutions in energy and mobility. As we have learnt in SPARCS there is not one easy solution to this but several, preferably interoperable: developing the electricity grid itself is one part of the solution but there are many others, which all should be assessed to create a feasible combination of solutions such as electricity storages, demand response, smart energy management tools, to best address the challenge.

SPARCS has had a significant impact on Espoo: during the five years of the project sustainable energy and mobility solutions have been developed and tested at three demo sites, but other supporting projects too. The SPARCS demo sites were chosen carefully: they present different parts of the city and are in different phases of city development, thus giving us valuable information not just individually but through assessment and comparison to each other.