Acting in partnership with the local community is one of the differentials of Smart City Búzios. We believe that the process to build the “city of the future” starts at schools, with the education of young people who become project multipliers. That is why we have developed an operational model specific to the school environment, with four lines of action: Training of teachers; Workshops with students about energy use and local identity; workshops with parents and school employees and debate groups.

We also promote the creation of a relationship network to multiply this concept with the whole population of Búzios, promoting training courses, debates, talks and workshops about sustainability and innovation that involved several segments of society – such as the hotel sector, schools, resident associations and retail – mobilising more than 18,000 people in the region.

The energy distribution we are used to has a unidirectional model, taking energy from the generation centre to the consumer unit. In smart cities, the innovative generation model allows customers to produce their own energy through renewable generation technologies – such as solar and wind – with the possibility to reinsert the excess generated into the distributor’s system.

Smart meters bring a new concept of electricity supply and consumption management, allowing hourly measurements of consumption, remote supply disconnections and reconnections and bidirectional metering - required to implement Distributed Generation by the customer.

With electronic meters, it is possible to analyse consumption in a precise way, allowing customers to access detailed energy consumption information and programme it for a time with a more convenient tariff. The smart management of energy usage can create savings of around 30% in energy bills.

In Búzios, more than 10,000 analogic meters were replaced by smart meters, developed in partnership with Landis+Gyr Brasil.

With smart grids, city lighting can be managed more efficiently, enabling regulation of luminosity levels based on time and the flow of people, matching power and preventing waste.

Lagoa da Usina received 60 remote-controlled LED bulbs, able to reduce average consumption by 60%. This reduction can reach 80% with the change in power according to time. Another 90 light points such as this were installed also on the Bardot Waterfront and Rua das Pedras.

The use of electric vehicles makes transporting people and cargo cleaner and more efficient, contributing to the reduction of pollution, the greenhouse effect and global warming. Búzios has an electric vehicle fleet of four cars, 30 bicycles and the Electric Aquacab, a vessel used by the region’s schools in educational trips to promote sustainable culture.

The electrical grid automation enables fast responses to critical situations, minimising the impact of electrical failures, reducing the length and frequency of power outages. Furthermore, it provides more security to information and the communication between network devices, enabling the supply of Internet access

In Búzios, we have installed free Internet access points on Rua das Pedras, benefiting visitors and residents transiting through the busy commercial street.