Smart Energy Cities

Abstract

The smart city paradigm encompasses a set of technological, mathematical, and communication innovations that ultimately represent a ‘city in a box’ (Odendaal 2021). The smart city narrative ensures that sufficient data are collected to inform the socio-economic, cultural, and environmental construct of urban spaces. A significant part of these data is ‘smart energy systems’, often described as smart grid/technologies, and put simplistically, the smart city paradigm cannot be realised without incorporating energy systems. Increasingly, ‘smart energy cities’ is a concept defined in the literature that combines the concepts of smart cities with energy systems to provide a sustainable, resilient, accessible, and affordable energy service. However, there are significant issues with smart systems, especially when viewed through the lens of users in the Global South, where there is the potential to make the system a technology-focused solution, which has the potential to amplify inequalities, rather than a people-based system that provides a series of just social, economic, and cultural benefits to society. In this chapter, we discuss smart energy cities from the perspective of West Africa to understand where the pitfalls, challenges, and opportunities lie. We conclude that an integrated approach is required to ensure that both high-level requirements and user-level engagement are met in the implementation of systems and highlight how mobile phones are starting to support some of these changes already.