Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Gretel Schaj: All right, you're now on record and then close to. Okay, be ready for that.
Okay.
Welcome to Smart in the City, the BABLE Podcast. In this special episode, recorded live at the ChangeNow summit in Paris, we're diving into the topic of energy, innovation and urban transformation. And there's no better place to explore this than Amsterdam.
Which is why I'm very glad to have here with me Mimi Elman, Innovation manager for energy for the city of Amsterdam. Welcome to the podcast, Mimi.
[00:00:35] Mimi Eelman: Thank you.
[00:00:37] Gretel Schaj: We'd like to start with an unusual question to get also to break the ice. So if you had to illustrate Amsterdam's energy transition with only three emojis, what would they be and why?
[00:00:56] Mimi Eelman: That's a very interesting question.
The first one that comes to mind is basically the exploding emoji with a top of the head that is really sort of nuclear power image. And it's coming to mind because we require a lot of energy.
And the second one is the dancing emoji of a person dancing and making moves.
That's why, because for me, the energy transition is really something that isn't done in a straight line.
It helps a lot if it's fun and if it's a fun activity to do, like dancing, for example, where you interact with each other and make it a great experience.
And while dancing, you also emit a lot of energy, so there's definitely something to harvest. Then the third one that comes to mind is really the heated emotion, which is different than the exploding emotion, but that really has to do with. When we're talking about energy transition, we tend to focus our attention towards the heating demand.
Well, especially in cities, the demand for cooling is really, really rising. And although when you're experiencing cold, it can be very discomforting, but when you're experiencing heat, it's a matter of life and death.
On the contrary to cold, because you can experience quite some cold before you start.
Well, not able to live amongst it.
Yeah.
[00:02:45] Gretel Schaj: I think that was such a great picture of some of the work you are doing, some of the challenges that are tackling, and it was very visual. So thank you. Thank you for that. So maybe just to understand that better and your role. So could you tell us a bit more about your background and what led you to work on energy innovation for the city?
[00:03:07] Mimi Eelman: Okay, my background, I was. I'm going to start with. I was trained as a geologist, so I was trained in how the Earth is working. Basically, what is the system of the Earth?
So at the time of my studies, which is more than 30 years ago, unfortunately, I became aware with the IPCC work and the danger of climate change. And at that time I thought, well, well, this is not going to happen in my span of life.
And while we have been right in the middle, we're right in the middle of it right now. So things that were more like a theoretical exercise are happening right now. And I know the potential, the possible outcomes of the change that is happening towards us right now. And that's a devastating perspective, to be honest, and it's really frightening. And I was trained as a geologist in what was coming towards us. What's happening right now.
Well, then I started working, of course, in the energy field in order to harvest our resources of the Earth.
And while working on it, the message is coming home more and more, of course, because we need to basically save not only our planet, because the planet is going to live, but we need to save ourselves.
And that is possible. The technology is already there, it can be done. We're all very smart people.
So the real challenge is really how do you ensure that you get set into motion? You start acting instead of talking about or analyzing, and in the end staying paralyzed on the spot while it's happening in front of you.
And my work has led me towards the city of Amsterdam as the place where I could really make an impact that could potentially well make an impact towards such a scale that is going to.
My life is going to add value to the whole of the Earth and the existence of the human kind. And I'm not a genius, but I can certainly put a little water in the big ocean of the achievement that we need to make.
[00:05:35] Gretel Schaj: And you are certainly also learning and teaching others to dance together. Back to your emoji reference. Since working with others and bringing this to scale is certainly part of what needs to be done.
Maybe also to make it more concrete about this innovation in the energy space. Could you tell us about a specific project that you are particularly excited about and maybe also what kind of impact it's already having or maybe it's expected to have?
[00:06:08] Mimi Eelman: Yeah, I'm going to tell you about a specific project that's been taking place in Amsterdam and it's all about sharing energy.
And I'm going to talk about it because the energy in itself is not a topic that comes to a lot of people's mind when you start talking about it, unless you're confronted with a shortage of it. If you can't use your computer, if you can't pay your bills because your telephone has been dropping out and your banking account is no longer accessible. And you start getting cold or really, really hot in your home because of the temperatures outside, and you're not able to make to get the temperature down to a level that's comfortable to you.
That is the moment when it starts hitting the mind. That energy is a crucial element to life.
So we all need energy in order to be safe and comfortable and to be able to live somewhere.
But we all think it is there because it's simply there.
So the absence of energy is not something that we're prepared for.
And we need to be more aware of that because it's no longer simply there. The energy.
I mean, there could be all kinds of reasons for a flood or a war or a different type of crisis where there's going to be an energy crisis, in which case people can't afford to pay their bills, or worse, are not able to make a comfortable living space any longer.
But how do you prepare for such a thing to happen?
That's only when a lot of people see and feel the urgency.
So my challenge is really, okay, how can you make energy such a topic that people start thinking about how to get the energy in a place where you need it to have it available even in times of crisis. So what are the type of activities that you need to to do as a city in order to prepare yourself for certain types of events that may take place or that may happen somewhere in the future in order to mitigate the impact?
And one of the examples where I think that's been starting to experiment with is in Amsterdam Nord, where there's a couple of initiative takers. A project owner or a building owner have taken the initiative to set up together integrated energy system, integrating different types of energy assets and making it accessible, but also providing power towards the owners and the inhabitants of that system, the users of the system.
And that's in Amsterdam Nord, in Republica Building.
Basically they built their smart energy system incorporating three types of different energy assets, varying from the electric vehicle loading infrastructure towards a ates that's providing heating and cooling towards the building and sharing the energy amongst the users of that building.
And in that project, they really struggled. How are we going to share the energy, but also how we're going to make a fair governance system where all the end users can actually influence the outcomes and have a say in what will we do with any revenues or future decisions.
And that is one project that has been not so much successful, but it certainly has been able to involve all the users of the system into one governing structure. And that's really of great Value. But then there remains a challenge. How are we going to keep it affordable?
And I've done a.
Not comparable, but well, in some ways a similar project like a decade ago on the island of Texel, which is an island in the north of the Netherlands where 250 households shared their energy consumption and tried to figure out, okay, to what effect can we steer the behavior of the users in such a way that they start using their washing machines or the refrigerators. Refrigerator at times where there's a low price for the energy that's being produced at that moment. And that was just fun. It was a lot of fun because you had a sort of. There was an entertainment, no, it's not a game factor in it, in the sense of that it became, well, you had the household who was having the lowest energy usage of the month or of the week, the largest savings that could be made. And, and it was what was really good to see that in that experiment we learned that the kids in the households were the determining factors in the energy usage.
And that came to delight because we installed a thermostat in the living room where everyone in the household could see what was happening with regard to energy consumption at that time.
And that was something different because very often there's just one person in the household who has the app on their mobile phones seeing what the energy usage is doing. That person is very often in the situations that I've seen is the man in the household the father or that role.
And if you have the thermostat with the information on it in open view, then the kids are the ones who start talking to their parents and warning them like, oh, you should really stop using the refrigerator or the heating kettle or whatever because it's really expensive right now.
[00:12:49] Gretel Schaj: Right. So it's a reinforcement of what's going.
[00:12:51] Mimi Eelman: On and messages and it's really, if you can start engaging all the users of the energy in the discussion around what are we doing right now and how can we change that or come to a different level. That is where you really start getting track tracking on the subject of how are we changing our energy consumption?
[00:13:16] Gretel Schaj: And I've heard from many cities that they struggle with engaging citizens, tenants in different levels when they talk about the energy transition. Like the topic or climate change might seem like too far away from their regular needs, like their day to day activities.
And you're speaking about like different projects where you had thought of different roles that these people, the citizens or the tenants would have here. So how do you design their involvement in a project Knowing like what kind of outcomes you want to get. Because I could imagine that part of that is understanding how do we want to involve them and what are the right methods to do that. So how do you plan that in this type of projects?
[00:14:06] Mimi Eelman: Okay, how do you plan that? Well, that's actually a very, very broad answer that I can give you to that question.
First of all, there is of course, the legal obligations that you have as a city to engage with your citizens, which is really sort of a minimum, what you need to do in order to engage. And it's not real engagement because it's merely fulfilling your legal duties in order to take decisions that are informed and supported by your citizens.
So that is one, but that's by far not enough to really engage with your citizens. So there's all kinds of engaging platforms.
I don't know the translation, but it's basically that you invite like a couple of hundred people who are representing a public consultation. It's like that where you really ask the representative citizen group, group of citizens in order to address the questions that are in front of you in order to take a well informed and carefully prepared decision towards the subject.
So public consultation is taking place in several forms at several levels, both at the city level as well as the local street levels, as well as the national level, for example, with regard to the energy transition.
And then there is. But the real challenge is where do you find the people and how do the people actually find the time to engage in the subject? Because there's no legal obligation for the people to be engaged on the subject. So there's a lot of people that say, whatever, I just expect the energy to be there point. And by the way, I'm not being paid by sitting in a public consultation or spending my time explaining to you as a civil servant what you need to do.
That's what you're being paid for. So it's always a challenge to get the engagement. And the key to that is really apart from all the things that we do organize and varying from asking or inviting everyone to an evening and telling or informing what you're planning to do, or having anchedes or questionnaires sent out, or just going round the tables or the doors literally to ask every person, okay, how do you feel about a certain plan?
One of the best ways of working is if you make it a fun activity. So if you make it a shared activity and if you can clearly show how it's going to impact the bill that needs to be paid.
So what are the benefits for the citizen involved in this project, what is it going to mean for my energy bill? If you can make that clear, which is not always clear, but if you can make that clear, you really, you have a start. For a conversation, I asked a couple of students to think about, okay, what way can we engage a lot better with the people in Amsterdam? Because very often we do live collectively in one building in apartments that are owned by one another. But the shared building is definitely a shared space.
And the students came up with, for example, a Tamagotchi per building and then really have a game with all the citizens involved with the Tamagotchi per building in order to see, okay, how are we doing that? You can earn points for your building, for example, to have solar coverage, to minimize the solar radiation coming in into the building, or for cooling techniques, or for isolation methods or measurements that you can take as a whole building.
And that was such a fun proposal that I really wanted them to pitch it and actually try it out. But we haven't been doing it yet.
But basically you can have a lot of information evenings and talk a lot about it and actually go to the kitchen tables of everyone who is involved and discussing it. But it boils down to make sure that you make transparent what is going to be the financial consequences of this decision for the individual citizen. And the second one is make it fun, make it a fun and a gaming element and then, and try to involve the children in that game, because that's where the real power is, steering the behavior.
[00:19:06] Gretel Schaj: So what I'm thinking is how do you, or maybe do you have a reference on which type of projects you decide, let's say, to have people, the citizens involved in the decision making process or in the governance.
And in which others do you decide? Okay, this requires rather more of behavioral change. And so the type of activities that we need to run are rather like gamifying it and informing. And maybe are there other projects where you are like, well, it would be much simpler if we just do the work and then inform people of what has been done. Like, I would assume that there are areas where we don't need to know everything that's going on, as long as it doesn't affect us at the end.
So is there like a framework or is there a way to decide, okay, this is what we do and how we engage in this type of projects, and this is the way we do for these other type of projects?
[00:20:06] Mimi Eelman: Yeah, actually there is, because that question has been coming up to mind to the governing authorities, of course, or the governing council what choices are we going to make and how are we going to prioritize our investments? What are the things that we need to do right now, no matter what?
What are the things we can delay or have a freedom of choice or to what level can you engage and what are the decisions that need to be taken now anyway? And that's always very hard when you're not in a crisis. So at the moment we're not in a crisis. That's a good part of it.
And therefore we've established basically any kind of project that we take on has to adhere to three conditions.
The first one being is, okay, what is going to be the impact towards the citizen in the sense of can we measure it in terms of emission reduction or in a different way, or lower costs of energy for energy to be paid?
The second part is to what extent is it going to change the living environment of the citizen or of the Amsterdammer as we say it, in the sense of is it going to be more comfortable in their houses, Is it, is the street going to be cleaner, is the environment going to be greener and cooler?
Or in what way can you make transparent what that kind of project is going to be impacting on their living environment? And the third one is, is it scalable?
Because we're very good in Amsterdam and in some other cities as well, but definitely in Amsterdam too do one off projects, because that's simply the way it works very often.
But it's absolutely necessary to speed up the transition. And in order to speed up, it's important that we sort of clone the one off projects towards the ten hundred and a thousands skill, because that's the level of skill that we're going to need in order to reach our ambitions and avoid becoming in a crisis situation or getting into a crisis situation where we will have to take decisions without a proper participation. Participation that you would ideally require. So at the moment we're in a situation that yes, there is time and space to actively engage with anyone on subject of how we're going to do it?
[00:22:46] Gretel Schaj: That's very interesting because I think it puts in perspective of what you can do now and also some of the possibilities that are still open, but also recognizing that there might be other times where this would be more difficult. And so in this decarbonization pathway, what are the possibilities but also the risks that you foresee, you know, on this whole transition and this transformation of Amsterdam into a carbon neutral city, what are the possibilities? Let's not paint a very dark picture, let's put some Dance moves. And not just the explanation.
[00:23:28] Mimi Eelman: What are the possibilities? Well, actually it can be done.
We just in the past months we made together with the Amsterdam Advanced Metropolitan Solutions Institute ams, we established what are the moonshots for the coming period in Amsterdam.
And we had great brainstorms and also visuals of how it would look like, like an Energy Biennale in Amsterdam, for example, or with dolphin like avatars swimming in the canals were translucent and energy providing. Anyway, it was a wild imagination.
But basically we know that all the technology that we need is there already. It's not rocket science.
The amount of the work that needs to be done is though there's different possible outcomes and different transition paths and that is what is the real struggle. Because as long as there is not an urgent crisis, in a sense of like, oops, there is no energy at the moment, we think we still have the time to talk about the best solution.
And the real problem is that we get paralyzed by talking it over and over and over again.
And basically it doesn't matter what step you're taking, because any step will lead towards a more sustainable future. And we need to take that step right now.
We can't afford to keep on talking in order to close the business case, because you are competing right now still with fossil fuels and you are competing right now with other solutions that may or may not be as good as your solution, but they could be transition solutions.
So instead of getting to the best answer, it's more important to just take a step towards the general direction that we're heading into, which is basically phasing out all fossil fuels point.
And you really need to take that through again and again and again. And it's not easy, it is really a difficult task. For example, at the moment we're studying to what extent we can reuse the existing gas infrastructure we have in the historic center of Amsterdam.
Well, yes, that can be done. I mean, we have a great asset in the ground that's operational, up and running, and we just need to flow gas through it.
So the questions that arise are how much? What is the amount of green gas that we can locally produce? Well, that's not too much, but it's certainly not too little.
So it can be a part of the total solution.
And then of course the question comes, but what if you burn green gas, then you still get emissions. Oh yeah, Oops. Right.
So we also need to think about the composition of that green gas. Can we compose it in such a way and is that compatible with the existing gas infrastructure? Is it safe to Use it and to transport that green emission reduction zero type of gas through it.
Well, it's getting a bit tougher already.
So my point is here, really, it doesn't matter what step you're taking as long as you're taking steps towards the general direction. And then all those steps together will land us somewhere. But we can't afford to wait and analyze and stay paralyzed.
[00:27:17] Gretel Schaj: Could it be because you were mentioning also before this, you are good at pilots, but the skill is not getting there.
So could it be that part of that paralysis has to do with, because of that fear to move forward to do maybe the best possible action? It's easy to approve pilots, but it's much difficult to say we'll go for skill because that needs to be the best solution. Could that be part of the mix and is there anything else in that mix where that is preventing from getting into skill, really bringing X and Y solution to the whole city and beyond that specific building or one neighborhood?
[00:28:01] Mimi Eelman: It's certainly part of it. Yes, it is certainly part of it.
It's for people much harder to take a very big step forward and to agree on what steps should be taken if you put everything together. So it's relatively easy to get small steps going.
But still you need to have the bigger perspective available in order to, once you start sort of running in those small steps or really dancing that you can see, okay, there is a whole stage where we can perform and you need to set up the stage for that performance effectively.
So you need to start thinking about really orchestrating what kind of little steps are going to go in front of the big performance.
What kind of rehearsals do you need? And those are the small steps where you go from one to ten in order to be able to go from the 100 to a thousand level that you're going to need in order to speed up, it's very hard to go there in one go.
So what we try to do, and that's not just me, but that's the city of Amsterdam with over, I think, close to 20,000 civil servants that are trying to work on every day on keeping the city alive and prosper and everything that comes with it, is to orchestrate those steps and take them in the right direction. So we set the ambitions and we translate them to operational goals and requirements, and those are the small steps that are leading us towards the big performance.
It can be done?
[00:29:51] Gretel Schaj: Yes, it is possible. I think that's a very important message, as sometimes when we are working in the subject and in climate change, sometimes we Feel like very low in energy. Where we see some organizations, some companies, some countries are going the wrong direction and it's kind of big dooming. But I think there is a pathway and it can be broken down into steps and moves and it's that path that needs to be walked or danced. And I think that's a. I think it's a very valuable insight that you are sharing.
Is there any other thing that we didn't discuss that you would like to share? Any other idea project that you are like, I really want to bring this to the audience.
[00:30:39] Mimi Eelman: Well, it's really what I experience every day is that you need to have a certain type of dream, you need to have a certain type of perspective or a moonshot as the Amis Institute called it, in order to get the direction moving.
So if you can set sort of the expedition goal in a way, because it is a type of an expedition, you don't know exactly how you're going to travel towards that end goal. But if you set the goal and if you can sketch the perspective that you're working towards to you make it really attractive, make it really beautiful, then you can set people into motion. Definitely. Yeah.
So forget about the doom and gloom, but just paint a perspective that's so attractive that everyone wants to go there.
[00:31:34] Gretel Schaj: And I think that perfectly leads us to the segment that we have today which is Inspire us.
And by Inspire us we want you to share a little bit with a story, a quote or anything that has really inspired you.
[00:31:53] Mimi Eelman: Okay.
Okay. One thing that has always been very inspiring and that support, sort of something that I.
Yeah, I will share is actually the one person that really inspired me as a pretty young girl is Madonna.
Because she has the guts to do anything she wants to bring in to this world from all of her talents.
Not caring about whether it's good enough or whether she's allowed to be there. She's just going to be there and present herself to the rest of the world. And that was so inspiring. She really shows off that you need to take that step. Don't be afraid of whoever is thinking about it, but just share your talent to the world.
So. And I think Madonna has done that in a great way. Whatever you think of her, that is amazing.
[00:32:47] Gretel Schaj: Thank you very much. I think that's such an important part to get that inspiration and feel like you are enough to be there on stage and something that probably we need to remind ourselves on our day to day work.
The last question, and this is a question that we ask every guest on the show to you, what is a smart city?
[00:33:11] Mimi Eelman: A smart city is a city that I would love to live in, that I would feel I could walk in, I could breathe the atmosphere. And it's just lively. There's lots of people.
It's vibrant. You can feel the energy.
And I think the smart city that we're dreaming of doesn't actually need a lot of energy, but it's capable of having a full circular energy system, and it's making use of the energy in the environment by ourselves, by the nature, by just all the energy that's in our environment available. It's there.
So just living very comfortably and feeling safe in a very green city where you can walk.
Yeah, absolutely.
[00:34:01] Gretel Schaj: Yeah, yeah. A city designed for its people.
[00:34:04] Mimi Eelman: Yeah, yeah. People first, Literally.
[00:34:08] Gretel Schaj: Yeah. Yeah.
Thank you very much, Mimi. I have truly enjoyed this conversation.
Likely I could stay here for hours, but I think we would need to end it now. Maybe we can continue. Off the record and to all of our listeners, do not forget, you can always create a free account on BABLE to find out more about smart City project solutions and implementations. Thank you very much.
[00:34:35] Mimi Eelman: Thank you so much. Very welcome.
[00:34:53] Gretel Schaj: I did you okay? No
