Nearly 40% of final energy consumption and 36% of greenhouse gas emissions are produced by buildings. The actual process of improving building energy efficiency is time-consuming and cost intensive. Energy experts spend a lot of time walking around buildings, collecting information, and using outdated tools to identify and evaluate energy savings. The solution to improve the process of improving energy efficiency can be Virtual Energy Assessment and automated evaluation of building saving potential. Within the EnergySequence project, it was aimed to develop a web intelligence platform that creates a building energy model for each building to identify energy saving opportunities and be able to effectively evaluate opportunities in energy efficiency management.
The overall objectives can be described as follows:
• Perform holistic building energy audits remotely and identify the building saving potential based on building energy modelling and analysis
• Analyse the state-of-the-art in the context of energy disaggregation and building energy modelling based on existing building information
• Develop different building energy models for energy efficiency analysis using inference models, physical modelling, reverse engineering, predictive modelling, and statistical analysis for the assessment of building energy saving potential
• Develop an energy efficiency score (EScore) applicable to every building expressing the annual energy saving potential of commercial and non-commercial buildings.
• Validate the automated remote energy audit results versus standard detailed onsite energy audit
Specific objectives:
• Developing EnergySequence a web-based intelligence platform that will drive deeper building energy efficiency savings at 5-10x lower cost and faster speed from traditional approaches
• Being able to unlock energy savings at scale. The key factor to unlock energy savings at scale is being able to preliminary assess energy efficiency opportunities at low cost, that means remotely without going on site, targeting the buildings with the most energy saving potential, therefore maximizing energy savings and at the same time minimizing upfront investments.
• Open up the market for energy efficiency assessments at large scale helping large corporations, municipalities, retail chains, taking energy efficiency to their portfolios in a cost-effective way.
• Help utilities with customer segmentation accelerating engagement, and program participation leveraging the vast amount of energy consumption data they gather through smart meters for billing their customers
• Increase the technology readiness level (TRL) of EnergySequence. By means of the developments within the project, we aim to reach a TRL 8.