| Abstract |
Smart utilities are the fundamental opportunities provided by smart cities for the public to live civilized. They are overall public solutions that combine the design and implementation of intelligent systems mainly for electricity, water, and natural gas in addition to tens of different assets like public transportation, healthy environment, water, sanitation with key principles of the “green economy.” Solutions for these systems are luckily driven both by businesses and governments in order to increase resource efficiency. However, due to rapid population growth and limited resources available, very effective urban management is needed in order to meet the requirement for smart utilities to increase the quality of public life in the city by using information and communication technologies. Nowadays, while we live together with digital technologies, mobility, Internet and data communication infrastructure, cloud computing services, etc., our local administrations try to quickly adapt to these developments and show their motivations with successful examples in the area. In this chapter, we will first examine the needs and expectations of the customers, residents who use smart utilities and services and provide general information about these services. We will also discuss the need for energy, the availability of resources, the balance of supply and consumption from the point of consumers and providers, intelligent infrastructures. Secondly, we will start with the electricity, the most important energy source of our daily life, and continue with water, waste water, and natural gas in order to give very detailed information for each in separate sections. In the sections related to the different utilities, the existing resource status, different resource alternatives, applied regulation, smart grids generated, and smart customer usage metering will be given with examples from current studies. © 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. |
