Busan ECO Delta City, South Korea
Busan Eco Delta Smart Village is a pioneering project located within the larger Busan Eco Delta Smart City development. This innovative residential area serves as a testbed for cutting-edge smart city technologies. Spanning an area of 6,068m², the Smart Village comprises 54 households housed in three-story residential buildings, alongside a non-residential service building that hosts the local control center. The service building also extends to three stories with an additional basement level. The project officially began in 2021, with residents moving in on January 15, 2022, agreeing to participate in the experiment for up to three years in exchange for their data. The village showcases a wide array of smart solutions, including connected home appliances, telemedicine facilities, and advanced urban technologies designed to enhance residents’ quality of life. It also emphasizes sustainability, aiming to achieve an impressive 107% energy independence rate through the use of solar panels and hydrothermal energy. As a microcosm of the larger Eco Delta Smart City project, the Smart Village plays a crucial role in testing and refining various smart city services before their wider implementation. These services span across multiple sectors, including healthcare, robotics, smart farming, and environmental management.
The Smart Village is managed by a local control center that monitors and optimizes the community’s energy use in real time. Each of the 56 homes and the community facilities are equipped with IoT sensors and smart meters that feed data into a central Building Energy Management System (BEMS). The BEMS collects data on electricity generation, consumption, and thermal energy use (heating/cooling), allowing operators to track performance continuously. A centralized mechanical room in the community’s central service building distributes heating, cooling, and domestic hot water to all houses under unified control. This means the control center can coordinate the heating/cooling supply for the entire village, optimizing when and how energy is used. For example, it can decide to run heat pumps or charge batteries when solar production is high and reduce usage during peak demand times. The Smart Village pilot project is owned and operated by the project partners K-Water with the project partner Dong-A University as research partner.