Dec 9 2019
Achieving EU energy and climate goals necessitates the decarbonization of energy consumption in buildings. Although there has been a steady increase in the consumption of renewable electricity in buildings, the use of renewable energy solutions for cooling and heating has been slow.
RES4BUILD partners at the second General Assembly. Image Credit: AquaTT.
The RES4BUILD project sponsored by EU Horizon 2020 will deal with this challenge by creating integrated renewable energy-based solutions that are customized to the needs and demands of installers and users.
Multidisciplinary experts at the consortium will aim to enhance the performance and lower the cost of the most advanced components of the RES4BUILD solutions—by incorporating magnetocaloric heat pumps, PV/T collectors, and a multi-source heat pump, which are enhanced through sophisticated control for better performance in building systems.
The different RES4BUILD solutions will be tested and verified under various climates with a detailed life cycle assessment, opening the door for bringing innovative solutions to the market and guaranteeing wide-scale adoption.
A lot of progress was already demonstrated at the second RES4BUILD General Assembly, which was held from November 20th to 21st in Vries, the Netherlands. Project partners JIN set up the meeting at one of the case study sites managed by Visio, which delivers housing and day-care to clients who have visual impairments.
The project will include a co-design process with stakeholders such as Visio. This will allow developers, service providers, and end-users to guarantee that resulting integrated energy systems will fulfill the requirements of the clients.
More case studies will be performed across a variety of appropriate sites across the Netherlands and Poland, including multi-family buildings, homeowner associations, industrial buildings, primary schools, and a shopping mall.
The aim of the project is to provide solutions that minimize the dependence of people on fossil fuels for electricity, cooling and heating in buildings. Through its effort, RES4BUILD will come up with a best practice methodology to renovations of energy systems in a more systematic and integrated manner, leading to more efficient operation and enhanced interaction with the grid, and thereby a lower energy bill for European consumers.
The co-design method will help with social inclusion and, in due course, enable an accelerated energy transition.
RES4BUILD has combined forces with eight other H2020 projects operating in the field of renewable energy technologies in buildings and has formed a group known as “Building Energy Horizons” to mutually gain from collaborative activities at technical and dissemination levels.