Smart Development of Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar Twin City Metropolitan Region, Gujarat, India

Abstract

With India transforming as matured democracy, the government is focusing upon improving quality of life of citizens by urban renewal and infrastructure development vide ambitious smart cities project. Energy, the electrical power in particular, has been the most crucial and the resource always in scarcity in India and proving itself as a major bottleneck. Therefore, India has been transforming legacy conventional non-smart non-intelligent unidirectional electrical power grids into modern smart grids which are bidirectional and intelligent in nature by leveraging ICT, IoTs, e-Governance and e-Democracy. Smart grids are likely to serve as energy backbones of smart cities and involve high interactive participation of citizens in energy management, based on humanitarian and customer centric approach. Different types of Prosumers (Producers + consumers), their different energy requirements at different timings, different types of energy resources and their switching feasibilities considering different aspects have been integrated. The Ahmedabad-Gandhinagar twin city metropolitan region (Naroda area) has been considered as region of interest and study. The region is surrounded by reputed industrial, commercial, educational-research organizations, heritage monuments and demonstrates extremely encouraging potential for creative research and technological developments with variety of Prosumers in particular. To study existing economic and spatial strategies and recommend suggestions for smart metropolitan region development have been main objectives of the work presented. Useful approach for smart metropolitan region development has been presented by effective energy management, active citizen participation and e-governance by proposing deployments of smart grid and smart buildings with integration of renewables, ICT and IoTs. Ensuring 24 × 7 electricity with limiting carbon footprint has been the major challenge.