Progress towards energy positive neighbourhoods

The COOPERATE Project is an international research project funded by the European Commission’s FP-7 program. The consortium consists of seven universities, research institutes and companies residing in England, France, Germany and Ireland. The target of the project is to progress towards energy positive neighbourhoods, since the building and transportation sectors are responsible for 36% and 30% of the EU CO2 emissions. Thus, the COOPERATE project will develop an open scalable, neighbourhood service and energy management platform to enable neighbourhoods to actively reduce their energy consumption. To achieve the EU Climate & Energy objectives, a mix of energy saving and energy efficiency measures, on a building and neighbourhood level, is considered.

During the project, the Institute for Software Engineering (SE), directed by JARA-ENERGY member Prof. Bernhard Rumpe, led the development of a common neighbourhood information model (NIM). The NIM models a selection of interconnected buildings, any energy generation facilities within the neighbourhood, the physical infrastructure used to connect the buildings, properties associated with energy supply, and demand and properties associated with energy transfer within the neighbourhood. Thus it enables integration of heterogeneous buildings into an energy efficient neighbourhood by adapting different data sources. Services can access the data and provide information to control mechanisms, to monitoring services, to simulation algorithms and for aggregating information for different stakeholders. To be able to cope with the amount of real time data the neighbourhood management platform utilizes cloud computing techniques and therefore offers flexibility and scalability. In cooperation with the RWTH Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems (ACS) and the RWTH Institute for Energy Efficient Buildings and Indoor Climate (EBC), intelligent model-based control and decision support algorithms will be developed and integrated into the platform.

The resulting concepts will be integrated in three demonstration sites, the Bouygues Challenger campus, the CIT Bishopstown campus and Parchement Square student accommodation. A lof of effort is put into the dissemination and demonstration.

T. Greifenberg, A. Lindt, M. Look, D. Plotnikov, C. Pinkernell und B. Rumpe,

RWTH Aachen University, http://www.se-rwth.de