The smart building and infrastructure domain of the Arrowhead project has clear market relevance for addressing one of the major societal and economic challenges of the coming decades: the energy efficiency and its relation with the climate change. The energy industry invested over $4 billion on energy efficiency programs and smart grid pilots in 2010 with considerable increases planned for the next several years.
Nevertheless, in spite of such investment and initiatives, the impact of the variety of factors that influence tomorrow’s energy-efficiency market (including regulations and legislation, users, technology acceptance and infrastructures, standards, etc.) is not yet fully understood, leaving room for further research and exploration.
It is well known that customers that are aware of their energy consumption (electricity, gas, heat and water) are able to reduce it by 15 – 20%. This is true for both industrial and home consumers (among others). Taken that into account, it is believed that new services can be offered to help not only final users to make decisions to improve their behaviour in the use of all the resources, but also managers to optimize building infrastructure and services.
The main objective of the demonstrators inside this domain is to foster the implementation of smart modules in the urban areas, contributing to the generation of Smart Districts or Smart Cities by providing innovative technologies and solutions in buildings and urban environment. This statement will be achieved by bridging the gap between the current base technologies (e.g. WSN, IoT) and their deployment, management and maintenance processes in real world use cases.
Demonstrator: Energy efficiency in buildings
This demonstrator consist of designing and implementing a smart ecosystem of devices, communications infrastructure, methods and components for achieving energy efficiency in buildings within the smart building and infrastructure domain of the Arrowhead project. The ultimate goal will be to come up with a new generation of smart building energy management solutions (BEMS) that can help attain significant reductions in energy consumption, thus contributing to meet the “20-20-20″.
Demonstrator: Eco-sufficient home
The main objective of this demonstrator is the deployment and validation of the embedded intelligence for new and networkable domestic appliances and systems dedicated to energy management and energy efficiency awareness allowing users to participate actively in the process of improving European ecosufficiency.
The final demonstrator will consist of a total of about 50 ats spread over several buildings connected to the Arrowhead network service by means of web-services. They will be equipped with domestic devices from FEL and other vendors (smoke detectors and controllers, gas controllers, flooding detectors, broken window detectors, movement detectors, blind controllers, CO2 detectors, washing machines or fridges) and the Home Energy Controller. Half of the ats will have a smart meter prototype and a HMI.
Demonstrator: Intelligent urban lighting
Three incremental prototypes will be deployed in a real scenario to transform the urban lighting of Barcelona and San Sebastián towards a more energy-efficient illumination solution minimizing light waste and reducing CO2 emissions.
This demonstrator will combine the urban lighting solution with environment information (light intensity, etc.) and mobility information (vehicles movements, etc.) to light up Barcelona and San Sebastián roads and streets in the smartest way possible.
Demonstrator: Virtual Control Rooms for Energy Efficiency
This demonstrator focuses on significant contributors to energy losses in the Nordic countries: car heating systems (widely used for preheating the motor and/or the car in winter times), lighting systems (which during winter time are used almost 24h /day) and outdated damming systems.
Current car heating systems in Finland have typically predefined heating time (2hours). Depending on outdoor temperature, this time can be either too long or too short, causing unnecessary energy consumption or deficient warming temperature of the motor. Car heating use is not monitored, which causes unnecessary energy consumption and unfair pricing between users.
Street lights have to be adjusted actively according to several parameters such as natural light level, time of day, weather conditions (temperature, snowing, ice on the road, raining etc.) and the amount of traffic.