Taiwan’s Smart City Summit & Expo has always been showcasing how tech is being integrated into the city infrastructure to further enhance the citizen’s lifestyle. We now have AI and many more other techs – but the Taiwan government wants to also achieve net zero by 2050. We will have to check in 25 years later – but we can see the initiatives that are in action now.
Retrofitting busses to become electric
In Taipei city alone, public transport is one of the most efficient methods to go to places. Busses are extremely important in Taipei, but they’re still burning fuel. It’s also impossible to swap all of the busses to become electric as the cost is enormous and quite wasteful since many buses are still perfectly operational.
So, the company called Master Transportation Bus Manufacturing Ltd. has self-developed a direct drive central motor for buses. The bus that was shown at the show floor looks like any other bus on the street – but it’s fully electric.
From what we were told, this motor is fitted with the motor alongside large batteries that can go up to around 300km in a single trip with AC turned on. It will also have fast charging and can top up to 80% capacity in 15 minutes or so.
New electric-powered buses
Foxconn, a Taiwanese company, also makes an appearance at the exhibition. While many people knows it as the company that assembles electronic devices – particularly iPhones, they also make buses. There are two new buses shown, the Model T and the Model U. Both these new buses are fully electric.
The Model T bus is redefining the conventional petrol buses with a sleeker design and optimized the layout inside the bus as some of the components are different.
The Model U is a luxury type of bus that is meant for less occupants. The seats inside are like a business class flight seat – and it is indeed luxurious.
Diversifying the power grid
As our world is now basically runs on electricity, having a reliable power source with backups at hand is important. Hence, Tatung Company also took part in the exhibition, showcasing their idea to implement a virtual power plant plan into Taiwan’s national electricity grid.
A virtual power plant is basically a management system that can control the flow of power and also ramp the production up or down depending on the demand. For those who own solar farms, excess energy can also be sold back to the energy companies.
The government also plays a big role as the electricity market will need to be opened up to other retailers to enter. I do personally believe that every country should implement such a policy as solar panels are now more affordable than ever and excess energy can be sold back to the companies so that it is not wasted. Not everyone has a large battery to store all the energy anyway.
Qualcomm Innovate in Taiwan Challenge startups
Surprisingly, Qualcomm makes an appearance too. Qualcomm is a huge company that designs chips for many different applications, hence their usage reaches the most unexpected fields in the industry.
Qualcomm’s presence in the Taiwan Smart City Summit & Expo isn’t new either, and they’re focusing on the innovative startups that brings benefits to the world. Here are 4 startups that piqued our interest:
Lingbo offers a SaaS management system that handles gas usage (either at home or restaurants, etc.) and provides notifications and alerts to ensure efficient usage and also safety, in case there are any gas leaks.
3drens provides both IoT-based SaaS (software-as-a-service) and HaaS (hardware-as-a-service) for logistics management to ensure address the growing demand of logistics while facing driver shortages. This company’s software management system can ensure the most efficient routes for the drivers to deliver the most amount of packages.
ioNetworks provides AI solutions for image and sound recognition. The company managed to achieve cutting-edge lightweight algorithms with high accuracy while maintaining low latency, and yet the application of this AI solution is sought after by many industries, such as automotive, smart homes, surveillance, and many more.
IsCoolLab developed a system called Robotiive, a patented robotic process automation system. This system allows multiple systems to talk together since it is cross-platform, cross-system, cross-machine data, while integrating all of them and also automating the processes. Basically, the one perfect industry to implement this system would be a warehouse. The system can manage and automate the inventory, retrieval and storing of items, and also update the online shop at the same time.
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