6.5 million euros European project AMBASSADOR aims for eco-friendly districts
The energy dilemma is growing daily, with an energy demand expected to have doubled by 2050 and the need to reduce CO2 emissions by half in the same time frame. Failure to solve the dilemma will result in frequent power outages, rising energy prices, and conflicts over resource access and control.
So far, research efforts have been concentrated on stand-alone buildings weakly tied to their immediate environment. Specifically in each building, only key sub-systems have been optimized. Such individual systems have been made more effective by becoming pervasive in any building area (the reign of “boxes” and “controllers”.) Also, importing parameters from other sub-systems has allowed better regulation (so called Access or Occupancy Management Systems). Still fairly new on the market, Energy Usage Analysis tools provide the capability to analyze energy profiles of the scattered buildings of large corporations.
However, this type of analysis and planning on a district level is as inexistent as Energy Usage Modeling leveraged in control schemes. This means that more effective building control schemes are an unexplored area and suggests a potential for each smart building to contribute to district-level energy optimization schemes, thanks to appropriate behavioral and stochastic models.
In parallel, many more renewable and cogeneration energy sources have been made available in the form of high-capacity energy storage systems. Such systems are increasingly taken into account during the planning of large districts, but still barely influence that of individual buildings. Energy flows (electrical or thermal) can be managed through energy usage schemes, at district and domestic levels, planned to deliver significant savings.
Funded through the EU’s 7th Framework Programme, the AMBASSADOR (Autonomous Management System Developed for Building and District levels) project will study, develop, and experiment on systems and tools that aim to optimize the energy usage within a district by managing energy flows, and predicting and mastering energy consumption and energy production. The overall goal is to define and experiment on a system that optimizes the cost of energy within a district, that cost being expressed in terms of Primary Energy, CO2, or euros. A number of mechanisms and technical systems will be studied, both at building- and district level, for the creation of such a system.
To achieve this aim, the project will use real-time adaptive and predictive behavioral models of buildings and districts, exposed to weather conditions, human presence, and energy-efficient materials and technologies. Such models will allow optimal supply/demand balancing to be reached. Building energy management systems will be turned into real-time configurable systems, bringing flexibility to the building. Thus, buildings will establish, in real-time, energy schemes linked to the district energy-management and information system (DEMIS). The project will investigate and validate the contribution of certain technologies to the energy-optimization objective of a district. The focus will be on technologies that are available or will be available at the horizon of the project. There is little interest in studying solutions which are too far away from commercial availability.
The results of AMBASSADOR will be deployed and validated on several validation and demonstration sites in France, Greece, and the United Kingdom.
These sites include the National Solar Energy Institute (INES) in France, the Lavrion Technological and Cultural Park (LTCP), Lavrion, southeastern Attica, in Greece and BedZED: the UK’s largest mixed use sustainable community.
Visit the AMBASSADOR Project at www.ambassador-fp7.eu
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