Sustainable energy Positive & zero cARbon CommunitieS demonstrated and validated technically and socioeconomically viable and replicable, innovative solutions for rolling out smart, integrated positive energy systems for the transition to a citizen centred zero carbon & resource efficient economy. SPARCS facilitated the participation of buildings to the energy market enabling new services and a virtual power plant concept, creating VirtualPositiveEnergy communities as energy democratic playground (positive energy districts could exchange energy with energy entities located outside the district). Seven cities demonstrated 100+ actions turning buildings, blocks, and districts into energy prosumers. Impacts spanned economic growth, improved quality of life, and environmental benefits towards the EC policy framework for climate and energy, the SET plan and UN Sustainable Development goals. SPARCS co-creation brought together citizens, companies, research organizations, city planning and decisionmaking entities, transforming cities to carbon-free inclusive communities. Lighthouse cities Espoo (FI) and Leipzig (DE) implemented large demonstrations. Fellow cities Reykjavik (IS), Maia (PT), Lviv (UA), Kifissia (EL) and Kladno (CZ) prepared replication with hands-on feasibility studies. SPARCs identified bankable actions to accelerate market uptake, pioneered innovative, exploitable governance and business models boosting the transformation processes, joint procurement procedures and citizen engaging mechanisms in an overarching city planning instrument toward the bold City Vision 2050. SPARCS engaged 30 partners from 8 EU Member States (FI, DE, PT, CY, EL, BE, CZ, IT) and 2 non-EU countries (UA, IS), representing key stakeholders within the value chain of urban challenges and smart, sustainable cities bringing together three distinct but also overlapping knowledge areas: (i) City Energy Systems, (ii) ICT and Interoperability, (iii) Business Innovation and Market Knowledge.
BIM4EEB aimed to foster the renovation industry by developing an attractive and powerful BIM-based toolset able to support designers in the design and planning phase, construction companies to efficiently carry out the work and service companies to provide attractive solutions for building retrofitting. Additionally, public and private owners were able to use a set of tools that eased decision making and asset management. At the heart of the system, BIM4EEB delivered an innovative common BIM management system with linked data as the basic instrument for increasing semantic interoperability between software and stakeholders involved along the overall renovation process (design, planning, construction, performance assessment and management). Two public administrations and two general contractor companies validated the BIM4EEB toolset in a social housing setting and private residential buildings in Italy, Poland and Finland with the aim to further ensure effective market strategies for the developed tools.
Building Information Modelling is a critical element in the digitalization of the construction industry, which is necessary in order to unleash huge efficiency and productivity improvements. BIMERR designed and developed a Renovation 4.0 toolkit which comprised tools to support renovation stakeholders throughout the renovation process of existing buildings, from project conception to delivery. It comprised tools for the automated creation of enhanced building information models, a renovation decision support system to aid the designer in exploring available renovation options through an the accurate estimation of renovation impact on building performance as well as a process management tool that optimized the design and on-site construction process toward optimal coordination and minimization of renovation time and cost. At the heart of the BIMERR toolkit lay an interoperability framework, which enforced semantic interoperability among BIMERR tools as well as with third-party legacy ICT tools to enable seamless BIM creation and information exchange among AEC stakeholders in an effort to enhance the rapid adoption of BIM in renovation of the existing EU building stock. The BIMERR toolkit was validated and demonstrated in 4 buildings in 3 European Member States. Two buildings were used for pre-validation and implementation refinement and the refined BIMERR toolkit supported the actual renovation design and works in one residential building in Poland and a second one in Spain. The assessment and evaluation of the BIMERR toolkit after these real-life activities fed material into two supporting horizontal project activities: i) dissemination and exploitation of project outcomes through the creation of best practice examples of BIMERR use that guided further replication effort, and ii) promotion of BIMERR outcome to the most relevant standardization bodies.
The EXCESS project built up on nearly-zero energy (consumption below primary energy threshold) multi-storey building residential concepts of the main 4 EU climatic zones towards Energy fleXible user-CEntric poSitive houseS (EXCESS). EXCESS defined a positive energy building (PEB) as a building that produces more energy than it consumes, with high RES self- consumption rate (instead of using the grid for solving seasonal balancing issues) over a time span of one year. Although RES and smart technologies exist, there are not any complete packages for different climates. Important technical developments for plus energy building materials and other individual technologies are required to address specific climate related needs in order to meet the PEB level, especially in harsh climates. Integration is needed for upgrading single technologies to be part of a large orchestra enabling also user-context-aware energy flexible services between utilities and customers (flexibility trading). These services unlocked additional revenue streams that reduced the lifetime cost of the developed PEB solutions, making them affordable also to a large portion of the society. EXCESS advanced new materials, technologies and integrated technological systems promoting a user-centric approach (building tenants), capitalizing on new ICT opportunities, for optimizing the interplay of local generation, storage, consumption at the building and district level. The demonstration activities in each of the climatic zones (Austria, Belgium, Finland and Spain) were accompanied by co-innovation, replication and exploitation activities to maximize the project technical, social and economic impact and to prepare for a future market roll out of the PEB concept by also scouting energy efficiency funding opportunities.
Despite the large economic energy saving potential in the EU, the energy service companies (ESCOs) market for residential buildings is much less developed than in other demand sectors (e.g. the industry or public/service sectors). Besides sector cross-cutting barriers (e.g. low energy prices, lack of information and awareness, lack of appropriate forms of finance) there are specific barriers which make a large-scale application of the ESCO model for residential buildings particularly difficult (e.g. lack scale or lack the necessary energy intensity to justify investment within the structure of present-day EPC model). In this context, frESCO aimed to engage with ESCOs and aggregators and enable the deployment of innovative business models on the basis of novel integrated energy service bundles that properly combined and remunerated local flexibility for optimizing local energy performance both in the form of energy efficiency and demand side management. Such new service and business models brought under common Pay for Performance Contracts (extended form of current EPCs) two currently differentiated service offerings to enable the realization of next-generation smart energy service packages. The strong presence of the industry in the consortium (2 ESCOs, 2 aggregators, 3 ICT and technology providers and 2 engineering companies) and the end-users (1 Cooperative and 1 Hotel), supported by 3 knowledgable RTOs, ensured the market uptake of frESCOs new business models. frESCO’s new business models were demonstrated in 4 different pilots (Spain, France, Croatian and Greece) with complementary characteristics in terms of building typology (single-/multi-family), climate, regulation, energy consumption, energy assets, consumer groups, etc., thus facilitating the replicability of frESCO’s solutions across Europe. Overall, frESCO aimed to directly achieve a primary savings of 464 MWh/yr and a reduction of 108 tCO2/yr and trigger 28.3M€ investment during the replication
PHOENIX aimed to provide a portfolio of ICT solutions to increase the smartness of legacy systems and appliances in existing buildings which further increased the value of Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI) as recently established by EPBD (Energy performance of buildings directive). By making use of artificial intelligence technologies as well as edge/cloud computing methods, the goal was to translate these improvements into human-centric new services for building users and an improvement on both execution of grid operations and data sharing. To demonstrate the real impact and replicability, the proposed solution with ICT innovations and cost-effective services was validated in 5 different pilots at European level, in Ireland, Greece, Sweden and Spain.
The UtilitEE project provided a customer-oriented Behavioural Change Framework (Energy-as-a-Service delivery approach via an open ICT ecosystem integrated into the building with off-the-shelf sensors). It focused on discovering, quantifying and revealing energy-hungry activities and conveyed meaningful feedback to engage users into a continuous process of learning and improvement. It was an innovative human-centric behaviour change framework based on scientific state of the art, along with standardised operational rating and certification methods, facilitated by an open and trustworthy ICT ecosystem integrated into the building through low-cost, off-the-shelf sensors.
The UPCHANGE project advances the state of the art in urban energy transition by delivering and validating a suite of seven integrated seven integrated digital and AI-supported solutions that overcome critical technical barriers in energy efficiency, flexibility, and resilience at both building and district scales. These solutions encompass advanced demand-side management, modular multi-functional façades for enhanced retrofit performance, AI-driven energy flexibility optimization tools, interoperable data integration platform, lifecycle eco-design assessment, sophisticated energy profiling machine-learning pipelines, and a KPI-based resilience assessment framework. By ensuring scalability, interoperability, and alignment with real-world implementation requirements, UPCHANGE empowers researchers, engineers, and city energy planners with robust tools for optimized energy planning, decision-making and ultimately fostering smarter, more resilient urban environments that are aligned with clean energy transition goals and sustainable urban planning.
More details at https://upchange.solutions/