Dr. Jens Bartholmes
Policy Officer, New energy technologies, innovation and clean coal
Directorate-General for Energy, European Commission
Belgium

Biography
Jens Bartholmes is a trained civil engineer with focus on energy efficiency of buildings. He holds a PhD in Hydrology - Physical mathematical modelling of environmental systems (carried out at University of Bologna, IT and Harvard University, MA, US) and works at the European Commission since 2004. He published more than 30 scientific articles on hydrology, hydro-meteorological probabilistic forecasting and decision support systems. During his time as researcher at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) he co-developed the European Flood Awareness system (EFAS) which now runs operationally. At JRC headquarters he co-ordinated the overall Work Programme of the JRC with particular responsibility in the area of Energy. Since 2.5 years he works at DG Energy leading the Smart Cities team of the Directorate for Renewables, Research and Innovation, Energy Efficiency. His work is focussed on the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities.

Abstract
Smart Cities and Communities

From scattered implementation Europe has to move to large-scale economically viable roll-out and replication of smart city solutions. The Smart Cities and Communities European Innovation Partnership is successfully working towards this goal since 2013 by bringing together cities, industry, SMEs and research to create critical mass and to foster the replication of good smart city solutions in a wide range of cities. The Partnership is about implementing these solutions to i) improve life of citizens in EU cities and ii) to enhance the important role of cities in reaching the EU Climate and Energy goals. The Commission's call to cities, businesses, the research community and civil society organisations to work together on making European cities smarter has proven a success: an Invitation for smart city commitments – distinct and independent from Horizon 2020 and not involving EC funding – was very popular and resulted in 370 eligible commitments bringing together more than 4000 partners from 31 countries. These are now organized in Action clusters working together on the implementation of these commitments and on scaling them up to achieve fast market growth in those areas. The focus is on aggregation of demand and mobilisation of additional public and private finance, and hence addresses key barriers to growth. Big data, benchmarking and monitoring progress are essential topics in this Partnership, but even just to get the full view on what is going on in detail in this field is already a challenge and therefore a large exercise to map smart city solutions all over Europe has been launched recently.