Trial / Demo
As a member of Ro3kvit - a coalition of professionals who have united to create knowledge and methodologies for rebuilding Ukraine’s urban and rural areas and infrastructure - IES Senior Project Manager, Niall Buckley, has been supporting Ukraine on an important project to restore, preserve and build energy resilience along the Dnipro River, partnering up with Greenpeace.
As the fourth longest river in Europe, the Dnipro holds immense significance in Ukraine, not only as a vital waterway for transportation and a source of energy, but also as a deeply rooted cultural symbol. Over centuries it has played a crucial role in the country's history, economy, and national identity, but tragically, in recent years, it has become a target of indiscriminate and immoral attacks, following Russia’s unlawful invasion on Ukraine.
Shortly after the Russian invasion began, Greenpeace launched a series of initiatives aimed at supporting a new kind of reconstruction in Ukraine. What started out as turning a small, damaged hospital into a green prototype, sparked the ambition to scale up and develop a concept for greening an entire city, region, or river basin, to help build resilience and prosperity, even in the face of the most extreme circumstances.
At the beginning of 2023, the urban coalition, Ro3kvit, was also considering a study of the importance and impact of the Dnipro River. The subsequent explosion at the Kakhovka Dam and tragedy that ensued cemented their ambition, and in the summer of 2023, Greenpeace and Ro3kvit joined forces to develop the Dnipro River Integrated Vision — an extensive study to highlight the significance of the river and lay a pathway for its preservation and restoration.
The Dnipro River Integrated Vision combines research, scenarios, and ideas for planners, policymakers, experts, and the public to encourage collaboration and dialogue about the river's future, in defiance of the ongoing war. Being an expert in building energy modelling, and how complex urban and rural energy systems integrate with local environments, IES Senior Project Manager, Niall Buckley, was well positioned to contribute to the project, volunteering his expertise to test future environmentally friendly and resilient energy scenarios for Ukraine’s buildings.
Ukraine is a highly energy intensive country, ranking 18th globally before the war, meaning it needs much more energy to produce one unit of GDP in comparison to many other countries. This presents challenges for the country's competitiveness and resilience in times of war, but also for its ability to rebuild and respond to longer-term threats, such as climate change.
The two main factors contributing to Ukraine’s high energy needs are industry and an ageing and inefficient building stock. Exploring opportunities to increase the energy efficiency of buildings along the Dnipro River, as well as the potential for renewable and local energy production and storage, therefore became key areas of focus within this project.
The city of Kremenchuk, which sits on the banks of the Dnipro River, was identified as an ideal testbed for this analysis, owing to its blend of energy intensive industrial buildings and a broad mix of residential, public and commercial buildings with low energy performance. Furthermore, after repeated military attacks on the Kremenchuk Combined Heat and Power and Hydroelectric Power Plants forced the city to look for temporary solutions - including diesel generators, gas and industrial boilers, and wood and coal stoves - local authorities were very much open to exploring green alternatives to modernise their local energy system.
Of course, for renewable energy systems and other solutions, such as battery storage and heat pumps, to be most effective, it is vital to ensure that the buildings connecting to these systems are as energy efficient as possible. Using various tools within IES’s digital twin technology suite, Niall conducted energy modelling across a selection of Kremenchuk’s buildings, to help define a pathway for their energy efficient renovation.
The analysis began by creating an urban building energy model of a small neighbourhood in Kremenchuk, comprising 35 multi-apartment buildings, a school, and a kindergarten, using iCD, to enable testing of various retrofit scenarios. The model was created using general building characteristics and system data derived from an archive of Soviet-style buildings from 2016, alongside local weather data and building geometry obtained from Google Street View, Open Street Map and in-person surveys.
The baseline energy analysis highlighted significant inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement, including poor building envelope performance, an outdated district heating system - which was seeing 35% of energy lost in transmission - and energy-intensive lighting installations. To address these issues, two scenarios were proposed:
A Standard Retrofit Scenario, determined to reduce the energy consumption of a typical multi-family apartment building by 58%, encompassing:
An Advanced Retrofit Scenario, determined to reduce the energy consumption of a typical multi-family apartment building by 82%, encompassing:
Additional modelling showed that, under ideal conditions, 1/3 of the energy consumed by all 35 residential buildings in the neighbourhood could be produced locally by solar panels installed on the roofs.
A more detailed building level analysis, using on site building survey data to inform energy models which were then calibrated with actual energy consumption data provided by the municipality of Kremenchuk, was also conducted for three of the city’s public buildings: a kindergarten, a school, and a hospital.
Through an advanced retrofitting scenario, applied in conjunction with solar panel installations covering 75% of the roof surface, it was determined that both the kindergarten and school could become Positive Energy Buildings, producing an annual energy surplus of 8% and 25% respectively. The seasonal use of these facilities make them well suited to play a role in urban energy communities, where citizens, neighbours, households, small businesses and organisations come together to produce, consume and manage energy at a local level, while significantly reducing environmental impacts.
While intensive energy requirements, and summer cooling loads in particular, make it difficult to achieve positive energy hospital buildings, it was still deemed that the hospital could achieve potential energy savings of up to 90% through the proposed retrofit measures and PV installations.
While the impact of implementing these measures in Kremenchuk alone would prove significant, the potential is even greater if we consider their impact scaled across the nearly 180,000 residential buildings and more than 70,000 public buildings currently existing in Ukraine. As such, this study outlines a pathway towards sustainability, resilience, decentralisation, democratisation and energy independence that Ukraine so desperately needs.
Commenting on the project, Niall states:
“Not only does the project promote a prosperous Ukraine, but it also epitomises the challenges and actions needed to support the global environmental issues we face today.
River-based urban centres have always fascinated me. These river systems have played pivotal roles in the growth of our cities. However, with time, technology, and economic growth, many have fallen into states of degradation which have had holistic negative impacts on their inhabitants as well local biodiversity.
I am honoured to have worked with Greenpeace and Ro3kvit to bring this important study to fruition, and to have succeeded in outlining environmentally friendly and resilient energy scenarios with the potential to radically transform Ukraine’s energy profile in these most challenging times."
To learn more about the project, explore the Dnipro River Integrated Vision website or download the full report.
