Innovations for Upgrading the Smartness of Buildings

An essential part of Europe’s clean energy transition is the changing role of buildings from consuming energy to actively controlling and optimizing indoor environment while contributing to energy system flexibility by ensuring distributed energy generation from renewable energy sources, energy storage, facilitate smart charging of EVs, smart metering, load reduction through energy efficiency and load shifting through demand response.

The revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive has introduced the Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI) to reflect the level of services offered by a smart building. This indicator gives a framework to assess the smart readiness of buildings and building units to adapt operation to the needs of the occupant and the grid and to improve energy efficiency and overall performance.

Innovative technologies will enable smart buildings to interact with their occupants and the grid in real time and to manage themselves efficiently, so as to become an active element of the energy system. Intelligent and connected devices, smart sensors and controllers, supported by the development of new business models for new energy services, will create new opportunities for energy consumers.

These new solutions will allow upgrading existing buildings, either residential or tertiary, using automation and IT to offer new services and control to the building users, thereby improving their comfort and increasing their satisfaction; they should result in an upgrade of the above-mentioned buildings’ SRI score.

Workshop chairs: Karine Laffont (DOWEL Innovation) and Nerea Gómez Morán (ECTP)

 This workshop first proposed a status update on the testing and implementation of the SRI indicator across Europe, with an outline of the supporting framework and activities provided by the SmartBuilt4EU project.

Following this, several EU-supported Innovation projects pitched the value propositions of their expected smart building innovations and associated impacts.

Projects include:

• Auto-DAN
• Smart2B
• COLLECTiEF
• PRELUDE
• SATO
• PHOENIX
• iBECOME
• domOS

Finally, all participants were invited to reflect and provide feedback on the roadmap and Smart Building R&I priorities developed by the SmartBuilt4EU project in a joint collective and interactive session.

Agenda:

• Opening by the EC – Pierre-Antoine Vernon (10 min)
• SmartBuilt4EU, the European Smart Buildings Innovation Community ( 20 min)
• Project pitches (60 min)
• Interactive Reflection on SmartBuilt4EU roadmap and R&I priorities (30 min) 
• Wrap-up & Conclusion ( 10 min) 

Context:

SmartBuilt4EU launched in February 2021 four open task forces to investigate the key issues and trends related to smart buildings and identify state of the art, best practices, barriers, challenges and opportunities to support their uptake. Their collaborative work is structured into white papers which will feed a Strategic Research Agenda to be presented to the European Commission.

These Task Forces federate volunteers from other H2020 projects, as well as members from the industrial and non-profit sectors.