Drones, finance and environmental sustainability: First Impact Jersey projects deliver

Last year, six diverse technology-driven projects were awarded grants as part of the first Impact Jersey Open Programme.

Over the past year, the recipients of those grants have made impressive progress in developing and implementing those projects, delivering significant impact across the community and economy.

Those projects included:

• Realtime Sensor IoT Project, by Andium Homes
• Breathe Air Quality Control
• Evie’s Corporate and Residential Mobility Platform
• Air Rescue Emergency Drone Team
• SPX – a proof-of-concept approach to insurance for the fiduciary sector
• Jersey’s Journey to Net Zero Carbon Project

 

Across the board, all six projects have progressed at pace, embracing collaboration, championing cooperation and touching all areas of the island, whilst also frequently needing to adjust as they have been rolled out. And, thanks to Impact Jersey, all are now looking to the future and the potential for further innovation.

 

Broad Reach

One of the great successes to emerge from the first round of Impact Jersey Open Programme projects has been just how broad their reach has been – benefiting all corners of the island, from farmers and emergency services, to businesses and social housing.

One of the projects, the Realtime Sensor IoT Project by Andium Homes, for instance, has proven highly successful, demonstrating the role technology can play in making Jersey’s communities more sustainable and resilient.

 

OP1 Success Story: Andium Homes’ Realtime Sensor IoT Project

 

Through the project, small sensors were installed across Andium’s estate to provide data around energy consumption and moisture levels, and help detect potential flood risk. Those sensors send automatic alerts where issues such as potential flooding are detected, that can in turn help avoid costly damage and disruption to residents. Importantly, it’s a project that has been warmly welcomed by residents in Andium sites, as Zoe Hibbs, Head of Communications and Media at Andium Homes, explains:

“We’ve been really encouraged by the positive reaction from residents. It’s been the small things that they have found helpful – for instance, drying laundry indoors and the potential that causes in terms of condensation and damp or using heating to warm a home up efficiently. These are all small steps but ones that can really help both us and our residents.”

SPX, meanwhile, is a groundbreaking project that is proving to have the potential to significantly mitigate risks for the fiduciary sector in Jersey – bringing together data from multiple sources and presenting it to fiduciary businesses, to ensure that insurance can meet expectations. Involving a number of local businesses, the project is demonstrating how technology can help the sector manage insurance requirements more effectively, as Henry Burton, Founder of SPX, explains:

“If there is doubt over the value or size of assets that are being insured, then it can waste a lot of time and not be effective. SPX can do a lot of the heavy lifting to bring data together and address that problem.”

 

OP1 Success Story: SPX’s Fiduciary Risk Platform

 

Collaboration

Another commonality across all the projects is how they brought together the public, private and charity sectors, to work towards a shared vision through technology.

The Air Rescue Emergency Drone Team is a case in point, with the team working closely with the emergency services to provide them with up-to-date information that can ultimately save lives, as Duncan Gray, Search Adviser at the States of Jersey Police highlights:

“The big benefit for us is the access to technology. It’s an instant feed, so we can see in real time what the drone is seeing and instantly direct people to a certain area where there might be a concern.”

 

OP1 Success Story: Air Rescue’s Emergency Drone Services

 

Evie’s new mobility platform is also bringing businesses together in new ways, to help them deliver on their sustainability ambitions by providing greener transport options. Through the platform, firms are empowering their staff by giving them credits that can give them access to a growing fleet of electric vehicles at the touch of a button – boosting employee engagement in the process.

“It’s had multiple benefits for us,” says Anthony Collas, mechanical engineer at Jersey Energy, one of the firms to use the platform. “It means that, if our staff are using an Evie car, they’re not having to think about refuelling, which is great for them – but it also reinforces our own sustainability credentials as a business.”

 

OP1 Success Story: Evie’s Corporate and Residential Mobility Platform

 

Ongoing Development

Delivering a new tech-driven solution is never going to be plain sailing, and there have been challenges and lessons learned along the way across all of the projects, that have required the innovators behind each to adjust and pivot accordingly.

Just as importantly, none of the projects are ‘finished’ – they are all a starting point with scope to extend, new avenues to explore and other opportunities to capitalise on.

Through the Breathe project, for instance, around 30 air sensors have been installed around Jersey to monitor air quality and reveal pollution hotspots that can enable policy makers, businesses and islanders to understand where air quality needs to improve. The project has already collected valuable new data – and there is huge potential in terms of the additional benefits that data can bring, according to Alan Irving, Senior Environment Officer, Government of Jersey:

“This continues to be something of a journey for us. Our focus now is to continue to develop and enhance a user-friendly dashboard so that the data we are extracting can be used and analysed easily, to help inform policy and the island’s carbon neutral strategy and benefit the island in ways beyond our initial ambitions.”

 

OP1 Success Story: Thrive Jersey’s Breathe Jersey

 

William Church, who has led the Jersey’s Journey to Net Zero Carbon Project, has similar feelings about his project, which has involved undertaking an island-wide survey, using satellite imagery, GIS data and on-the-ground fieldwork, to fully assess Jersey’s carbon stocks and highlight areas of high sequestration potential.

 

OP1 Success Story: William Church’s ‘Living Map’ of Jersey

 

Information collected through the project is available now through an online interactive platform that can empower policy makers, landowners, farmers, and the community to help plan better and encourage more sustainable land use practices– but William believes the project continues to offer much further opportunity:

“To take this forward, I believe this will need interaction with Government to encourage land users, such as the farming community, to find ways to act in ways that can help with carbon sequestration.”

Across all six projects, there is scope to develop further and create additional impact beyond their initial objectives.

For Andium, for instance, not only are smart sensors bringing together valuable data, they have also acted as a catalyst for better communication with residents, something that the organisation is keen to build on.

For Evie, their platform can act as a further step along the way to shifting mindsets more widely around car usage.

For the Emergency Drone team, there are now plans to ‘grid’ the entire island to improve coverage accuracy.

So whilst these groundbreaking projects may well have met their goals and addressed some key areas of island life, they are by no means finished – and none of them would have happened without Impact Jersey support.

You can read more about each of the projects here.