Limerick

City Description

Located on the western periphery of Europe, within close proximity to Shannon International Airport and Shannon Foynes Port, Limerick is Ireland’s third largest city and designated as one of Ireland’s Gateway Cities under the National Spatial Strategy (2002); it has held the title of Ireland’s Smarter Travel Demonstration Area since 2012. The city has excellent connectivity with the other large urban centres of Ireland through high-quality road and rail networks. Limerick’s historic core, within the contemporary urban centre has grown in a sustainable and resilient manner that has harnessed the unique location as one of international importance.

Have you ever wondered about where your energy comes from and how you can lower your energy costs?

Limerick City and County Council is part of a new pan-European project spearheaded by innovation specialists in conjunction with designers, developers and regulatory experts, who are looking into new ways of helping to reduce energy consumption while maintaining the characteristic Georgian heritage of Limerick city centre.

Funding has been awarded under the EU Research and Innovation Funding programme, Horizon 2020, for a smart cities and communities project of €24m for seven cities to create smart positive energy districts (areas which create more energy than they use). Limerick City and County Council together with expert partners will develop solutions for buildings located in the Georgian Innovation District to help generate more energy than they consume and allow for the excess energy to be returned to the grid. Several buildings forming a Positive Energy Block, will be the first to become part of a new renewable energy management structure which will allow for the two-way flow of energy.

These include Gardens International, the GPO, Limerick Youth Service and Limerick Chamber, with others on the way including St Michael’s Rowing Club, Rooney Auctioneers, ENGINE, the Athenaeum Building, and Limerick and Clare Education and Training Board Building.

Over the next 3 years, exciting new projects in the Georgian Innovation District will test developing smart technologies as part of Smart Limerick’s Digital Strategy.

City Map

Press kit material about the project

The +CityxChange vision is to co-create the future we want to live in. To achieve this, the following framework will be adopted:
(i) Prototype the Future – Integrated Planning and Design
(ii) Enable the Future – Creation of a Common Energy Market
(iii) Accelerate the Future – CommunityxChange
This framework will incorporate 11 Demonstration Projects, which will be carried out in the Lighthouse Cities and replicated in the Follower Cities. These projects encompass the environmental, spatial, social, technical, economic, regulatory and legal aspects, required to deliver Positive Energy Blocks/Districts (PEB/D). They will lead to recommendations for new policy intervention, community engagement, market regulation and business models that will enable scale-up and replication of PEB/Ds across the city and across the EU.
(i) informing citizens of the potential and opportunities that could result from a DPEB (MODEL, ENGAGE);
(ii) enabling citizens to take ownership of their buildings and their communities, through: 
  • behaviour change, which improves the efficiency of their buildings (ENGAGE)
  • enabling investment to create prosumers instead of consumers of energy (INVEST)
(iii) enabling innovation and new disruptive technologies to emerge at a local level, through
  • new regulatory mechanisms to test disruptive technologies (REGULATORY ZONE)
  • innovation playgrounds fostering new and emerging technologies and services, enabling local stakeholders to accelerate their solutions to the wider market (PLAYGROUND)
  • testing of new solutions for seamless e-mobility integrated with the energy system (eMaaS)
(iv) enabling a fair price for energy for all consumers in a community, through
  • a more flexible energy system (MICROGRIDS)
  • peer-to-peer trading across the microgrid, within the DPEB (LOCAL TRADING)
  • trading between all consumers, not just large industrial consumers (FLEXIBILITY MARKET)
(v) co-creating the future of the city with its citizens through a Bold City Vision for 2050 (VISION)
The proposed +CityxChange solution has led to the creation of 11 Demonstration Projects (DPs), which will be implemented in the two Lighthouse Cities (Limerick, Ireland and Trondheim, Norway). A replication profile and framework for each DP will then be created so that the Follower Cities (FCs: Alba Iulia, Romania; Písek, Czech Republic; Sestao, Spain; Smolyan, Bulgaria and Võru, Estonia) and other EU cities can exploit the solutions of the +CityxChange project. 
+CityxChange will create solutions for Positive Energy Blocks leading to Positive Energy Districts and Cities through:
(1) decision support tools which enable informed decisions to be made by all stakeholders in the community; 
(2) an approach to creating a Positive Energy Block through energy reduction and efficiency measures, local renewables, local storage, flexibility and peer-to-peer energy trading; 
(3) top down community engagement driven by the local authority and bottom up citizen engagement to inform, educate and drive behavioural change.

Limerick video playlist

Gallery

News

Creative play: Imagining future Limerick

Organised by the University of Limerick researchers as part of City Engage Week in September 2019, this event targeted families with children between 5 and 10 years old, and aimed to introduce +CityxChange to this young age group. The event took place in Fablab Limerick and brought together a group

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City Energy Game

This event, organised by the University of Limerick and Limerick City and County Council as part of the first City Engage Week took place with two groups of participants, on two consecutive days at Fab Lab Limerick in September 2019. The “City Energy” boardgame is about collective decision-making in the

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Events

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