Hybrid Building Concept Integrated with Off-the-Grid Energy Generation Systems and Smart City Grids

Energy consumption for building-related services accounts for approximately one third of total European Union’s energy consumption. The quality of life in Europe’s cities states that although quality of life has improved in many areas, in other areas such as environmental issues and energy efficiency have deteriorated. In such places, people, companies and public authorities experience specific needs and demands regarding domains such as energy efficiency, environment and transportation services. These domains are increasingly enabled and facilitated by web-based applications, service oriented architectures, ubiquitous sensing infrastructure, advanced information management applications such as data warehousing and data mining technologies which generate actionable information for intelligent and predictive control for further optimised smart buildings and cities. This paper addresses an integrated building concept that operates on energy-efficient basis while capturing retrofit opportunities that scale from a single building to multiple buildings at district level. The proposed concept is developed based on two research areas; (1) Building energy supply-side (micro-grid) management and (2) Building energy demand-side management complementing with the integrated energy production from renewable energy sources, building energy diagnostics and predictive control, ubiquitous wireless sensing technologies, and micro-grid power electronics and power control to exploit the potential for reduction of building energy consumption, thus addressing the deficit of insufficient tool support. With hybrid off-the-grid energy generation and management systems, significant energy savings can be achieved, thus helping to attain objectives on climate change and security of supply. The research focuses on an innovative model-driven development approach that integrates systems in building supply-side and building demand-side to balance efficient energy production from off-the-grid systems and optimized consumption The research findings will be demonstrated in an office building in Hannover, Germany integrating different energy efficient production/consumption systems addressing the renewable energy technologies coupled with energy storage systems and building energy management systems comprising scalable and robust sensing network platforms, energy performance monitoring and data warehouse technologies.