“Energy Efficient Optimised District Heating and Cooling”

E2District is a three year European Commission Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation project formally entitled “Energy Efficient Optimised District Heating and Cooling”

Objetives

The aim of E2District is to develop, deploy, validate, and demonstrate a novel cloud enabled District Management and Decision Support framework for DHC systems (District Heating & Cooling), which will deliver compound energy cost savings of 30%. It considers people behavior flexibility strategy to manage and support smart energy usage and decision making for sustainable district heating and cooling systems. The project aims to create a replicable model which can be promoted under the EU Horizon 2020 project framework and adapted for other similarly managed industrial or domestic sites - whether local, national, or international - with a view to delivering increased energy efficiencies and measurable cost savings.

Milestones

The success of the project will be followed by the accomplishment of the next developments:

  • A District Simulation Platform (DSP), which will be used as an “Asset Portfolio Decision Support Tool” to optimize DHC asset configuration and utilization, targeting >5% energy reduction.
  • An intelligent adaptive DHC control and optimization methods targeting an energy cost reduction between 10 and 20%, including flexible production, storage and demand (prosumer) assets, and system-level fault detection and diagnostics algorithms for physical and operational fault root cause identification and analysis supporting cost-effective DHC maintenance.
  • Development of a Behavior Analytics Tool for learning and continuously refining the demand behavior models, and to develop prosumer engagement tools and user interfaces that keep the human end user in the loop, targeting overall energy savings of 5%.
  • Development of a flexible District Operation System for the efficient, replicable and scalable deployment of DHC monitoring, intelligent control, FDD and prosumer engagement & analytics tool.
  • Development of novel business models for district heating and cooling Operators, Integrators and Designers, including lessons learned and guidelines for achieving energy efficient districts.
  • Validation over demonstration of E2District platform benefits in 3 different demonstration sites: one real over the district heating of the Cork Institute of Technology Campus and two virtual, over great real district heating systems operated by Veolia.
  • Development of strong and rigorous dissemination, exploitation and path-to-market strategies to ensure project outcomes are communicated to all DHC stakeholders and the scientific community as well as all of the relevant DHC associations (such as E2BA and DHC+).

Duration

Start Date: February 1, 2016.

Completion Date: January 31, 2019 (36 months).

Consortium

In order to achieve the objectives of the E2District project, a well-balanced consortium has been assembled representing key stakeholders within the DHC value chain from equipment manufacturers (UTC/UTRC), DHC operators (VEOLIA/VERI) to building systems integrators (ACCIONA), as well as centers of excellence in the area of building modelling and simulation (CSTB), and information and communication technologies (CIT). At an industrial level, the partners represent the whole value chain from construction to operation to end user of district heating and cooling systems.

  • CIT Cork Institute of Technology Ireland
  • ACCIONA Spain
  • UTRC Ireland
  • VEOLIA France
  • CSTB France

Web page

www.e2district.eu

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