The purpose of Regional Action Plan for Tuscany is to improve monitoring systems and funding through the project Empower, to contribute to the potential of energy efficiency in public buildings. We work to ensure that the Tuscan region makes a public commitment to support a further strategy to improve the energy performance of all its buildings by the end of the legislature (spring2020). However, we will open a comparison with the same goals with the administration that will be elected in the spring of 2020.

ARRR is developing proposals to suggest how to improve the Smart City control room in Florence, the subject of a project thanks to which it will become a state-of-the-art facility throughout Europe. The smart city control room in Florence already processes an impressive amount of data, from traffic to pollution, which it makes available to administrators and citizens.

Empower's goal is to evaluate data on public energy consumption (electricity and gas) in order to set the best strategies for reducing consumption and energy efficiency: which was discussed in the online meeting on 31st of July. The meeting was attended by the staff of ARRR, the technical office of the Tuscany Region and the IT company that is implementing the regional control room.

The Tuscany Region (with the sector for the transition to digital and technological infrastructures) confirmed the commitment already in place to create a technological infrastructure, i.e. a data collection platform, to be made available to local authorities or other public entities, in order to arrive at a regional network of smart cities.

The goal is therefore to create a flexible infrastructure capable of satisfying multiple needs: the first subject on which to test it is precisely the Municipality of Florence which has indicated the need, in particular by the technological infrastructure development service directed by Gianluca Vannuccini, to implement the platform on a data center with high-level quality, precisely at the regional data center.

Future implementations with other municipalities or on other domains are planned. The Empower project and the Tuscan Digital Agenda Regional Implementation Office agree that introducing the topic of energy consumption is of great interest, because we are increasingly understanding how the management of multiple heterogeneous data sources can increase the possibility of creating smart city services.

The strategy to reduce consumption and combat climate change passes through the improvement of knowledge and technologies, and to this the Empower project, the Tuscany Region, the local authorities are working with great commitment.