Cities across Europe and Central Asia are navigating two fundamental changes at once – the green and the digital, also known as the twin transition. The green transition demands cleaner energy, smarter buildings, and more resilient infrastructure. The digital transition promises better data, faster decisions, and more responsive services. In practice, these two pressures converge in the same place: the city itself, where aging infrastructure meets mounting climate stress and where the gap between what cities know and what they need to know is growing wider.
In February 2026, ten startups and non-profits took part in the BOOST x CEF Green Urban Tech Sprint Demo Day – pitching green and urban technology solutions to a jury drawn from city administrations across the region. Three teams were recognized by the jury, all tackling the same underlying challenge: helping cities better understand the systems they manage so they can make more informed decisions about infrastructure, public services, and climate resilience.
A grid that speaks
For most cities, the high-voltage power grid is a black box. When a line goes down, the response is reactive: a failure occurs, a patrol is dispatched, and the fault is eventually found. In an era of increasing climate shocks and rising energy demand, this is an expensive way to manage critical infrastructure, and an increasingly risky one.
SAMST, built by Montenegrin startup LoRaSi, was recognized as having the greatest impact potential. It wraps around existing grid infrastructure without requiring utilities to replace what they already have. Sensors clip onto towers and transmit data over a communication protocol chosen precisely because it continues to function when cellular networks fail. An AI anomaly detection layer flags issues in real time, with current reported accuracy above 85 percent.
“Traditionally utility teams send on expensive helicopter or ground patrols to inspect towers for physical wear once or twice a year,” the LoRaSi team explains. “With SAMST, operators can monitor everything from a control room. If a tower starts vibrating excessively due to wind or shows a heat spike in a conductor, the system flags it immediately.” Then a maintenance technician can be dispatched to a specific tower, shifting the process from reactive to pro-active actions.
According to their proof of concept with CGES, Montenegro’s national grid operator, the system maintained reliable data delivery across 3.5 kilometres in extreme weather – and the anomaly detection has already identified signatures similar to those that preceded the June 2024 Balkan blackout, which cost the regional economy millions.
Grid digitalization is becoming increasingly urgent for cities everywhere, including in places like Ukraine, where electricity infrastructure has been under sustained physical stress. But any city deepening its reliance on renewable energy needs a grid that can handle the variability that comes with it. As LoRaSi puts it, digitalization is “the glue that allows for reliable and more efficient renewables integration.” Grid digitalization, in other words, is not a technical upgrade; it is a prerequisite for the green transition.
A city that trusts its own voice
As AI tools become more integrated into public administration, city staff have started using commercial platforms to handle institutional queries, translate documents, and answer citizen questions. In doing so, they are feeding the city’s knowledge, its archives, its institutional voice, into systems owned by private companies operating outside EU jurisdiction.
QX, a North Macedonian startup recognized at the Sprint for the most innovative solution, built a city-owned, open-source AI platform that gives municipalities full control over their institutional intelligence. The platform draws on content the city curates, keeps interactions within the institution, and integrates with existing municipal systems – archives, citizen services, mobility data. It is designed so that institutional policy governs what the model can and cannot say. It can also be deployed quickly, and audit trails are built into the architecture, covering EU AI Act compliance without requiring a separate reporting layer on top.
In practice, digital sovereignty is less abstract than it sounds: a city assistant that answers visitors in 20 languages without sending a single query to a foreign cloud; a staff knowledge tool that absorbs decades of municipal expertise and keeps it inside the institution when senior employees retire. Active deployments are now underway in Valencia and Poreč, with cities in Southern Europe, the Western Balkans, and Central Europe in co-design.
A network that watches
Cities need to know what is happening in their air, their microclimates, their green spaces. But high-quality, real-time, geographically distributed environmental data is expensive to collect and even more expensive to sustain, and most municipal monitoring systems offer limited coverage at best.
TUMO Labs, an Armenian education technology organization, won the audience vote at the Sprint with ClimateNet: a student-built, open-data IoT network that monitors temperature, humidity, air quality, and other climate parameters across approximately 30 locations in Armenia. The data is free, accessible, and already in use by research institutes, universities, agritech companies, and government organizations – a scientific institute has drawn on it to study how forest species are responding to shifting climate conditions; a local university is combining it with commercial sources to build more accurate weather models; and farmers are using microclimate readings to make better decisions about irrigation and crop management.
“For us, it was a form of real validation,” said the TUMO Labs coordinator, “not just from mentors or within a classroom, but from a broader audience recognizing the value of something we actually built.” The goal now is full national coverage across Armenia, followed by international expansion through the global TUMO network, creating a distributed cross-country environmental monitoring system for climate research and education.
What comes next
These three solutions describe the same city: one that can see its grid, trust its information, and monitor its environment in real time. Each addresses a blind spot that cities currently navigate without adequate tools. Together, they illustrate that better decisions depend on timely, trustworthy information and the ability to turn that information into action.