Adapt-&-Play Holistic cOst-Effective and user-frieNdly Innovations with high replicability to upgrade smartness of eXisting buildings with legacy equipment
The reduction of greenhouse emissions in E.U. is based partially in the increase of Europe’s energy efficiency , by at least 32.5%, in all energy sectors by 20301. The building sector has been seen to account for around 40% of the final energy consumption in developed countries2 and for 36% of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe. It is therefore, important to give a particular emphasis to improving energy performance of buildings considering that refurbishment of existing buildings could lead to significant energy savings and play a key role in the clean energy transition, as it could reduce the EU’s total energy consumption by 5-6% and lower CO2 emissions approximately by 5%.
PHOENIX is an innovative project funded by EU’s Horizon 2020, which aims at changing the role of buildings from unorganised energy consumers to active agents orchestrating and optimising their energy consumption, production and storage, with the goal of increasing energy performance, maximising occupants’ benefit and facilitating grid operation.
The project will design a portfolio of ICT solutions covering all aspects from hardware and software upgrades needed in legacy equipment and optimal deployment of sensors, to data analytics and services for both building users and energy utilities. PHOENIX will take advantage of artificial intelligence technologies, as well as edge/cloud computing methods, to provide the highest level of smartness to existing buildings. The tools that will result from the project will offer the possibility of establishing a new framework that will enable the optimisation of the energy use and infrastructure exploitation, while at the same time facilitate the creation of new SMEs and Start-Up ideas to exploit new revenue streams and business opportunities.
To achieve this ambitious goal, PHOENIX relies on a consortium of 12 partners which has the technological knowledge and expertise to understand the social and technical requirements and translate them into ICT innovations ( IoT, AI and Data Analytics) for the integration and smartness upgrading of existing buildings with legacy equipment and systems. Moreover, in order to validate and evaluate the proposed solution, PHOENIX partners will provide 5 different real-world pilots at European level (located in Ireland, Greece, Spain and Sweden) that will consists on multiple buildings with different supply and demand profiles, diverse legacy technologies and varied levels of smartness.
The Smart Energy Systems of Elin VERD will lead the Greek pilot and the work on the Smart Readiness Indicators development as well as will coordinate the “Pilots Deployment, Operation and Socioeconomic Evaluation” Work Package.
The project’s duration is 36 months and the allocated total budget by the European Union is 3,999,965.50 Million Euros.
[1] European Commission, “Clean energy for all Europeans,” Luxembourg, 2019.
[2] L. Pérez-Lombard, J. Ortiz, and C. Pout, “A review on buildings energy consumption information,” Energy Build., vol. 40, no. 3, pp. 394–398, Jan. 2008.
© European Union, 2020
Project PHOENIX is funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union under Contract Number 893857.
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