Helsinki on track to becoming a truly smart city

Nuuka has announced that we are the successful tender to implement an energy and smart building management system for the City of Helsinki. This has been a project I have been working on with our team for many months and to see it end successfully for the company is great news.

Cities are huge consumers of energy and a significant source of global carbon emissions, consuming over 60% of the world's energy and creating over 70% of global CO2 emissions. With Nuuka in the buildings, Helsinki will be on a pathway to becoming a truly smart city that does contribute to problems of pollution and climate change.

The energy and smart building management system that Nuuka will deliver to the City of Helsinki will entail energy reporting, indoor air quality and HVAC process performance analytics. Energy reporting includes monitoring of electrical, district heat and water meters for 1000 buildings in Helsinki. In addition, Nuuka will provide HVAC and indoor air quality monitoring for 150 buildings, providing more extensive analysis of the buildings’ indoor air and process performance.

It is also worth noting that Nuuka enables two-way connection to the building automation systems, which enables demand response applications in the buildings of City of Helsinki in the future. An example demand response application could be to steer down the electricity usage of building when the electricity market price is high.

I am proud of the work that the Nuuka team has done on this, but also impressed by the City of Helsinki’s approach to selecting Nuuka for this task.

I can say that throughout the whole tender process, the City of Helsinki and the sustainable consulting company Green Building Partners were transparent and open. The evaluation process took eight months in total and was professional and clearly structured from the tender’s point of view. The City of Helsinki is committed to its strategy to reduce CO2 emission significantly and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2035 as well as being at the forefront of international energy efficiency. To achieve the energy efficiency goals, the acquired energy and smart building management system plays a key role.

As a person living in Helsinki, I have a lot of respect for their processes and am impressed by their professionalism throughout this tender process. Nuuka had to deliver the best plan, user experience for the software users and approach that would satisfy the needs of the City to be competitive and that is a good thing. There shouldn’t be any free lunches when you deliver services to the taxpayers of Helsinki.

Now that we have won the tender, the next step is delivering on our promises. This is the real hard work. I know that the team is ready and excited to help make Helsinki a model of sustainability and productivity through using big data in the buildings here.