Disruption as a Catalyst for Innovation
RUNWITHIT (RWI) Synthetics moves beyond the static, built environments of digital twins into the next logical step forward.
Progressing beyond the built environment involves integrating twin technology with agentic and heterogeneous modelled environments, creating a six-dimensional space that includes time, context, and people.
We are not simply looking at the future of place but at the emergent future behaviour of people in their environment. RWI’s Synthetic Environments feature never-identified, geo-tagged synthetic people, each with a set of attributes reflecting their lives, demographics, health, habits, psychographics, patterns of life, circumstances, activities, responses, preferences, and values — all generated from publicly available data.
We can overcome the limitations of data collections due to bias or oversight in collection to help the invisible and marginalized be seen and included in areas where populations are described as “temporary.” Our Synthetic Populations encompass economic, psychological, social, and physical contexts, which opens up innumerable applications.
For example, we’ve recently applied our Synthetic Twin technology to analyze electrification in the face of climate change, environmental disruption, clean energy technology adoption, and other regional conditions.
Synthetic Twins are valuable for decision-makers, leaders, and stakeholders due to the unprecedented nature of the immediate and long-term future.
Tomorrow is Not Like Yesterday
Understanding context and incorporating the human element is vital to all decisions, from calculating infrastructure investments to designing engineering projects to community building and social health initiatives. We can make things previously invisible within these systems visible, allowing them to be quantified, measured, and considered.
Moreover, having a “third space” where decision-makers and stakeholders can collaborate, de-silo specialized knowledge, and engage with one another in a converged data environment is critical to facilitating resilience building in the face of highly complex problems.
A Synthetic Twin or Synthetic City begins with a geospatial and object-oriented perspective of the Earth and its regions, with dimensions of time, context, and people added in. We accomplish this by including interconnected models that are appropriate and contextual to the entities we include within any given Synthetic Environment. They range from physical systems to statistical or probabilistic models to programmatic models. Connecting these models, ranging from the simple to the complex, enables us not only to system-see but also to system-solve. That is, we can step back and examine the interplay between data sets, whether anecdotal or research-based, along with adjustable trends and manipulable forecasts, allowing us to make operations visual, configurable, and inflectable.
The Air We Breathe
We’ve generated a Synthetic Twin of Edmonton, Alberta, a city in the prairies of Western Canada, where summer wildfires are considered both acute and chronic climate events and have become a significant part of Albertans' lives. It’s changing their relationship with various services, the environment, and public health.
In previous case studies, we’ve used our Synthetic Twin of the Edmonton Metropolitan Region to examine not only the health and economic impacts of particulate matter (PM2.5)—the tiny, often carcinogenic particles found within wildfire smoke—but also how best to geolocate and utilize mitigation methods to protect vulnerable populations.
However, for this case study, we will demonstrate how acute and chronic summer wildfires are changing the relationship between the population and energy, specifically how households consume energy with the convergence of increased reliance on EVs, air conditioning and heat pumps and in response to temperature and air quality.
Manipulatable Scenarios for Dynamic Forecasting
Let’s start by setting the stage for electrification in Synthetic Calgary, a city in Southern Alberta. We have a synthetic population and synthetic households across 44 Calgary neighbourhoods. We have 27 data points per household, which allow us to view their carbon footprint, income, energy use and consumption through extremely detailed lenses.
Synthetic Calgary comprises a diverse cross-section of the city, including over 146,000 synthetic individuals, 63,000 unique residences, and a comprehensive selection of grid assets. Our Synthetic Twins are dynamic, interactive, and look into the future. This enables us to explore and forecast the management of the energy transition in Synthetic Calgary across the entire electricity value stream. We can see whether an individual household is sensitive to time-of-day pricing or whether it is likely to leave its air conditioning on while its members are away at work.
We’ve created an inflectable world and can now sandbox scenarios within it. We can adjust knobs and levers and, through our synthetic modelling, see how households would react to factors such as electric vehicle or solar adoption rates, outside temperature, and the city’s base load curve. We can even include psychographics for household members, integrating their attitudes towards solar energy and EV adoption. These synthetic people can adapt in response to the situations and environmental changes we might introduce.
Unveiling the Toxic Evolution of Wildfire Smoke
By converging this model of Synthetic Calgary with our work on wildfire and PM 2.5, we can begin to systematize and examine the interplay between electrification and wildfire smoke. Wildfire particulate matter poses a significant air quality issue, making indoor air quality increasingly important as smoke particles outdoors become increasingly hazardous to both short-term and long-term health. Wildfire smoke is likely to coincide with heat events in the summer, when air-cooling and conditioning use is highest.
We can start to ask essential questions within our sandbox that converge these vital subjects: How effective are building envelopes of different ages? What technologies are adding the most to load curves? How does the population, given their demographics and psychographics, consume different technologies, and how does this affect “behind-the-meter” behaviour? What happens when Calgarians change their energy behaviour in 2035, after a decade of global warming? We quantified the increased energy load in 2035, based on projected scenarios for EV adoption within a selected geographic region of Synthetic Calgary. Using this projection, we demonstrated that 25% of households charging EVs results in an additional 3,947 kW of load, compared to 201 kW of load in the same neighbourhoods in 2024 with present EV adoption.
RWI also utilized Synthetic Calgary to forecast AC adoption and its potential increase in the face of summer heat events and wildfire smoke, down to specific demographics and neighbourhoods with comparable populations. Looking ahead, it’s projected that summer heat events will increase by 300%. While air conditioning hasn’t been widely adopted in the past, it has now become a critical measure, given the increased likelihood of individuals staying inside during both heat and wildfire smoke events, where opening windows is not an option. This will have a significant impact on behind-the-meter behaviours, energy consumption, and the base load.
A standard projection of AC unit adoption forecasts an increase from 40% of homes to 68.5% of homes with various types of AC units, including central air, portable, and window units. However, taking into account the inability of households to open windows to cool at night due to wildfire smoke, there is a scenario where 84% of households have AC units.
Within Synthetic Calgary, under the 84% adoption scenario, we can see that the younger, more affluent neighbourhood of McKenzie Lake would have 2,429 AC units, with 34% of them central air and 47% being portable units. An older neighbourhood with a lower median income — and buildings with more permeable heat envelopes — had 3,590 AC units, 74% of them portable and only 1% with central AC.
Solution Sandboxing for the Unprecedented
Our Synthetic Twin is not limited to electrification scenarios. As mentioned, we’ve used this same approach in these Synthetic Twins to examine where health facilities should be located and how people access them. Moreover, we’ve demonstrated where air quality sensors, devices, and investments in sensor technology are today and where they need to be to address the community's health impacts.
Beyond regions local to us, we’ve created Synthetic Twins across the globe, having recently launched Synthetic Earth, a living, agentic AI and data model of our planet. It’s the first of its kind — never before has generative AI, agentic AI, super-scale in-memory data handling and VR visualization been combined.
We’re pushing the boundary of what twins are capable of by moving beyond the static and towards inflectable, 6D twins with applications leading communities, regions, and industries towards a visibly better future.