The goal of Groningen Smart Energy City is to accelerate the sustainable energy future by the introduction of new concepts, tools and processes that elevates the current Smart Energy Cluster to a “User centered Smart Energy solution development ecosystem”.

In current best practice “Power Matching City” 42 households are fully integrated in sustainable energy use and sharing. This pilotproject got international attention and praise as frontrunner in the global transition towards a more sustainable energy supply. The project Power Matching City is putting the “Smart Energy Citizen” in control of fine tuning his energy demand towards the fluctuating supply of energy from sustainable sources Simultaneously user centered cooperative projects like Grunneger Power have raised the awareness and organization level of citizens in the generation of sustainable energy.

These successes have raised the ambitions of Groningen. The city makes significant efforts to take the Smart Energy cluster to the next level and become a Global guide city for smart energy developments. These ambitions are also transformed into action plans such as “thousands of smart households”. But is seems smart to scale up this innovations also in other European regions.

The goal is to give smart energy citizens access to local, national and international energy markets and attract investments for developing smart energy data and useful applications. Our credo is that we can tackle global challenges with local solutions. Currently we are looking for partners, network and finances to realise these ideas. We will have to scale up together in order to have significant positive impact on development, uptake and market introduction of new smart energy solutions in Europe.