UrbanTide is announcing an exciting new partnership with the Island Centre for Net Zero (ICNZ). Our innovative data insights platform, uSmart will be used by the ICNZ to better understand, and overcome, the challenges associated with decarbonising Scotland's biggest islands.
The Islands Centre for Net Zero is a ten-year, £335 million program that seeks to spearhead decarbonisation, leading Scotland towards its 2045 net zero target and the rest of the UK by 2050.
Powering Scotland’s biggest islands (Orkney, Shetland and the Outer Hebrides) requires a significant amount of energy due to their remoteness and heavy reliance on fossil fuels (at least 78% of energy consumption relies on petrol, diesel, heating oil and fuel oil).
However, the region is also extremely rich in natural resources and is set to become a major renewable energy hub. It has the potential to generate more than 10% of the UK’s energy through wind, wave, and tidal power.
As some of the most remote islands in the UK, this challenging geography demands innovative thinking when it comes to energy solutions. This is why the ICNZ has been created: to drive forward a lighthouse project to collectively decarbonise the islands' entire energy system, with the intention that the project can be replicable worldwide.
How Smart is supporting the drive to decarbonisation
The purpose of the ICNZ innovation centre is to support the exploration, trialling and acceleration of solutions to decarbonisation. What can the data tell us about how energy is consumed on the islands that we don’t know yet?
The islands have diverse and complex economies, so to decarbonise them, we need to gain a full understanding of where carbon emissions are currently coming from, and this requires gathering large amounts of data. Our innovative data insights platform, uSmart, is supporting the ICNZ in this drive.
By providing a single-source platform where the ICNZ can collect vast amounts of complex datasets from across the islands, they can access the necessary insights to understand and overcome the current challenges and barriers on their journey towards decarbonization.
uSmart can collect any form of open data - and is already gathering everything from fuel usage and vehicle data, to data on top soil - to the ICNZ’s own white-labelled version of our data insights platform.
The ICNZ program
The ICNZ is an innovation centre developed by an island-based consortium. This consortium is led by the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) with partners Heriot Watt University, Aquatera and Community Energy Scotland. The three Island Councils are also heavily involved in the project.
There are five key outcomes that the ICNZ are driving forward:
- Acceleration of a just decarbonisation across the three island groups
- Green job creation and transition in the islands
- Generation of new enterprise and revenue streams
- Support Islands Deal projects’ achievement of decarbonisation goals
- Development of internationally recognised islands transition expertise and capabilities, transferable beyond Orkney, Shetland, and Outer Hebrides.
To fund the project, the UK Government is investing £16 million and the Scottish Government is investing £500,000 in ICNZ through the Islands Growth Deal.
Data: The key to national decarbonisation
The islands are on track to become significant renewable energy hubs, harnessing both onshore and offshore resources to potentially generate as much as 10% of the UK’s energy through natural resources.
Data gathering is proving so essential to the roll-out of decarbonisation projects that we are currently supporting a number of other islands with similar projects.
For example, we're supporting ReFLEX Orkney in rolling out its IsleAI project. IsleAI seeks to create 'place profiles' that support more energy-efficient homes and an equitable transition to Net Zero technology across the islands.
uSmart is also being used by Carbon Neutral Islands (CNI) to track and understand habitat and land analysis. By gathering vast amounts of data on soil types, uSmart is able to visually map out the different land types in an interactive visualisation.
These are just a few examples of how uSmart - and data more generally - will be a key driver in the UK’s transition to net zero. To see how uSmart collects, tracks and visualises energy data, please get in touch to request a demo.
