Matteo Pozzi spoke in Chicago at the 2023 edition of the International Conference organized by IDEA (International District Heating Association). The conference annually brings together members of the district heating industry from across North America and the world to share and promote best practices, enable collaboration, and leverage members’ expertise and emerging technologies. The 2023 edition was entitled Empowering the next generation and focused its attention on the decarbonisation sector.
Matteo Pozzi’s speech “Digital and Analytics Innovation Study for the NYC Steam System” took place on June 6 and concerned the project that Optit developed with Con Edison, the company that manages the New York district heating system, one of the oldest energy companies in the US.
The conference was an interesting moment of sharing and in-depth study from which we summarize some fundamental points:
- District Energy really is one of the most available, mature and accessible solution to manage the transition of the energy sector towards a low (and zero) carbon economy. The EU and North American markets are very different, but they share the same mission and challenge;
- Presenting our project with Con Edison was a fantastic opportunity to showcase a great example of knowledge and technology transfer, supporting the largest utility in North America face the challenges of the upcoming complexity leveraging on digital innovation to improve decision making;
- Our presence in the USA will be key to scale up and replicate opportunities to optimise planning of upcoming DHC systems, from design to operations;
- Landing in New York City on the day of the big cloud from the fires in Canada (after having experienced the severe floodings in Emilia Romagna a few weeks earlier) shows that (unfortunately) that there is no time to waste to accelerate this transition.
We will do our best with all our strength.
