This week’s Smart City roundup features how Singapore cleverly handles its Smart Nation transition, why a city in Tennessee invests in smart water infrastructure, and how South America battles electricity theft with smart meters.

Singapore to protect privacy in Smart Nation initiative

Singapore’s Smart Nation is well underway, and during the Quality & Standards Conference, Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan, minister-in-charge of Smart Nation, discussed how they are handling the transition.

According to Balakrishnan, three sets of standards will be implemented in the next two to three years, and one of these standards will take care of the privacy issues that comes with connecting things to the Internet.

The first set of standards will oversee the integration and analysis of data related to public areas, homes and buildings. The second set of standards will manage privacy concerns over the transfer of data by ensuring the security and protection of said data. The same set of standards will also be responsible to ensure better inter-operability of the infrastructure. And the third set of standards will relate to domain-specific standards, which will be used for areas such as healthcare, mobility and urban living.

Murfreesboro chooses Itron for smart city initiative

The City of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, has chosen Itron, Inc., a company that focuses on technology dedicated to the smart use of energy water, to modernize its water distribution system.

Itron’s solution will enable the city’s Water & Sewer Department (MWSD) to take advantage of detailed meter data and analytics to support enhanced customer service, revenue protection, consumption forecasting, flow analysis and district metering. Itron’s technology will also help MWSD detect leaks and reduce non-revenue water, associated costs and potential service disruptions caused by major leak events.

Consumers will also benefit from this smart infrastructure as they can access their accounts online and see their consumption information. This will help consumers understand their water usage so they can reduce the amount of water used and save money.

South America deploying smart meters

South America has an electricity theft problem, a situation that has caused injuries to meter readers. To battle this problem and avoid further injuries to meter readers, countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Chile and Argentina are now deploying smart meters.

South America is seen as one the next key battlegrounds for winning major contracts. It is expected that investment will reach $22.6 billion in smart metering, $7.2 billion in distribution automation and $8.3bn in other smart grid market segments over the next 10 years.

Smart meters allow for remote monitoring of electricity consumption, which means meter readers no longer have to physically do the reading and they are no longer subject to physical abuse.

Photo by Bergadder (Pixabay)