Silicon Valley of the South: Chattanooga offers low-latency compute for smart city applications

A city of just under 200,000 in the Southern U.S., Chattanooga, Tenn., has taken countless steps to cement itself as one of North America's smartest cities. In 2010, local utility Electric Power Board of Chattanooga introduced a citywide fiber-optic network, which led to its Gig City moniker and allowed EPB to offer 10-Gb internet speed community-wide by 2015 — the first city in the Western Hemisphere to do so. The city-owned fiber-optic network set the connectivity foundation needed to support the city's smart grid, and the city recently announced a connected 100-intersection corridor that will be equipped with connectivity to collect transit data. Chattanooga has since served as a regional tech hub, and plans to roll out quantum-as-a-service connectivity for public use in 2023. With an eye toward economic development opportunities, the city's collaborative smart city ecosystem aims to touch on issues of connectivity, mobility and electrification.

Snapshot

Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence

The Take

Chattanooga is the embodiment of many "what-if" smart city scenarios. What if a city and its citizens had access to fiber-optic speed WiFi? What if a city could integrate distributed energy resources, like batteries and solar, into its grid to better serve customers and reduce emissions? The city offers unique insight into what a region might focus on when connectivity is no longer an issue. While fiber networks and 5G have become more common in cities, perhaps the biggest lesson Chattanooga can share with aspiring smart cities is the importance of an active, collaborative smart city ecosystem. The city's collaboration with EPB has paid dividends so far, and Chattanooga is well on its way to becoming the Silicon Valley of the South by attracting high-growth, federally subsidized domestic manufacturing opportunities.

Early adopter snapshot: Smart grid

Chattanooga's early mover advantage in fiber has greased the wheels in the city's wider digital transformation and adoption of disruptive technologies. A strong partnership with local utility EPB has paid dividends, with some estimating that the city has generated a return on investment well over $2.5 billion into the decade-old fiber optic network via job creation, research and development tied to the network, and less utility downtime and fewer outages. The fiber-optic network provides connectivity for smart grid equipment, advanced metering infrastructure on homes and buildings, and distributed automation equipment. While the utility-owned fiber network was initially built out to support smart grid capabilities, it has since extended its impact to applications like intelligent transportation, and has looked to close the digital divide by offering equitable access to the high-speed network. The $232 million project was partially funded by the Department of Energy via a $111 million smart grid investment grant.

Use cases and deployments

The city breaks down its smart city projects into three main objectives: energy, health and transportation/mobility. Nearly all projects benefit from fiber connectivity in some way.

Energy: The city's decade-old smart grid has paid dividends for residents and has been used as a living lab by local research institutions looking to deploy novel smart energy technologies. Working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory, the city has tested microgrids, battery storage and optical sensors for substation monitoring. EPBs grid also integrates solar panels, and several nonprofits offer community workshops on how to reduce energy use for individuals and businesses.

Health: The city relies on urban analytics to collect data on infrastructure and citizen health. Data from emergency room visits, through partnerships with local healthcare providers like TennCare, is just one example of insight the city is using to mitigate inequities and facilitate greener spaces. Hyper-local air-quality data collected from environmental sensors has been used to create impact models across different neighborhoods, in order to better mitigate health-equity challenges. In 2015, the city announced the "green|spaces" initiative to address home-related health risks like asthma. Through community education and investing in a workforce that could offer free home improvements, the project was funded partially from savings received by TennCare as emergency room visits and hospitalizations dropped. The Enterprise Center is another key actor in public-health-related projects.

Transportation: Chattanooga approaches transportation with an eye toward energy demand and grid integration. With the same testbed approach the city takes toward smart energy, it has looked to deploy innovative transportation solutions as well. Managing goals of emissions reduction and pedestrian safety, the city has deployed a smart corridor of 100 intersections. These intersections are instrumented with connectivity, and collect and analyze data on traffic patterns, bottlenecks, and pedestrian and cyclist movement. Beyond transportation infrastructure like LiDAR sensors and processing units, the city has used that same real estate to deploy cameras, LoRa gateways, audio sensors and environmental sensors that feed into a citywide dataset. On the electric and autonomous vehicle front, the city has deployed an electric shuttle, an EV car-share program and a bike-share project.

Data strategy and development

Chattanooga is a data-driven city. With a host of smart city use cases ranging from smart gird to smart street lighting, representatives at the city say that about 50% of the data being collected from the intelligent corridor is processed at the edge. The remaining half is split between near-edge and cloud venues. The nature of intelligent transportation use cases, such as intelligent demand-responsive signaling, as well as pedestrian and cyclist identification through computer vision, demands low-latency data computing, with decisions like retiming a light or holding a green for an EMS vehicle needing to be made and relayed in near real time. Other data, like emergency room visits and 311 calls, is equally important to the city's mission of being value driven, although it doesn't require the same level of data infrastructure to collect and store. The city stores its data in the Amazon Web Services cloud.

The city has already leveraged the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to upgrade legacy road infrastructure. Looking forward, Chattanooga hopes to tap into funding from the CHIPS Act to reach goals of becoming a regional tech and innovation hub. The $53 million CHIPS Act offers $39 billion in direct subsidies for the construction of new semiconductor fabrication plants, $11 billion for semiconductor R&D, and other funds for supporting legacy processes. Chattanooga may tap into this by attracting manufacturers to the region for building or expanding plants, or engage in R&D initiatives on semiconductor research and prototyping, as well as chip packaging.

Working with Chattanooga

Most of the city's smart city project either originates from the Chattanooga Smart City Collaborative or from research projects at UTC's Center for Urban Informatics and Progress. While the city technically could host any number of smart city applications — even those with the highest data demand — it chooses to focus on a handful of transformative projects yearly. The city's connectivity has already paid dividends in economic development as well, with a handful of companies relocating to Chattanooga. While the city does have open bids for procurement, most are related to updating existing infrastructure like wastewater treatment plants and sidewalks.

Volkswagen AG invested over $1.2 billion in 2014-2019 to bring 3,000 jobs to the city, and Australian battery manufacturer Novonix Ltd., known for its production of synthetic graphite, opened an office in the city in 2022 and shortly after received a $150 million Department of Energy grant to build a new factory. Novonix's approach offers one look into how businesses may tap into opportunity in Chattanooga. Stringent made-in-America battery-sourcing requirements and billions in federal funding opportunities could attract foreign EVSE manufacturers to relocate production centers domestically. Further opportunity lies in the intelligent transportation space, which is known for its low-latency data requirements that allow vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication in real time. Startups can work with the city via Co.Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating sustainable mobility, and other SMEs through mentorship. After announcing its intelligent corridor earlier this year, the city has expressed interest in deploying an advanced traffic management system — a project that could be pursued by a pure-play ITS vendor or application provider.