Towards Carbon Neutral Municipalities

The Ii municipality (pronounced “ee”), home of ten thousand in the north of Finland, engaged in tight carbon reduction targets. Ii has purposefully realised 43 separate improvement projects. Encouraged by good success, Ii advanced the 80% reduction target from the original year 2030 to 2020, involving all carbon emissions in the municipal area, not only by the municipal operators.

Early on, Ii started monitoring energy and utility consumptions. ionSign provided Neutron12 units for collecting data. Micropolis, the local development company, built a management and reporting system based on EmonCMS, an open source solution, maintained by OpenEnergyMonitor.org. ionSign provided device interface documentation to enable building communications. The EmonCMS provides required calculations, data repository and visualisations. Data flows directly from the Neutron field units to the EmonCMS server, in the internal municipal network.

For their success in carbon reduction, the European Union awarded Ii with the RegioStars Prize in climate action category, in October 2017. Already in May 2017, the Agenda2030 youth group had awarded Ii with their special prize of sustainable development.

Some twenty Neutron12s are now in use and more will be installed in years to come, to improve the coverage and granularity of energy and utility data. Download the whole story in the case study below.