SmartLivingEPC
Advanced Energy Performance Assessment towards Smart Living in Building and District Level
Project Summary
The next generation of Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) are a promising source of information to achieve a more climate neutral building stock. Improved schemes are required not to show only data on the building’s energy consumption, but also on their operational performance over the full life cycle. However, there is still a need to develop more reliable and cost-effective methodologies that address digital tools and smart control systems.
SmartLivingEPC aims to deliver a building certificate through digitalised tools including not only energy, but also sustainability, water consumption, acoustics and human-centric variables. The new procedure will use real data from the overall building’s life cycle for both the “as designed” and “in-use” performance of the building. Additionally, SmartLivingEPC will develop two novel different schemes; one at the building level, and another one at district level where smart grids and the interaction among buildings are considered in the final rating (i.e. street lighting, network services, energy communities, electric vehicles, etc.). The latter looks at the single building assessment from broader perspective by including citizen participation and building’s relationship within a neighbourhood/district. Finally, the project will deliver a methodology to certify energy-efficient neighbourhoods preparing for the future decarbonisation of cities.
IES' Role
IES’ main role is to integrate AI services as part of the building energy assessment procedure. AI-enhanced tools will be designed to analyse real data from buildings, providing valuable insights into their behaviour and usage to promote energy efficiency.
The AI tools include a comfort inference engine to assess thermal comfort, an activity inference engine to monitor occupant activities, a disaggregation engine to estimate individual appliance energy consumption, an anomaly detection engine and a cost estimation engine. Those techniques will not only lead to behaviour changes, but also to detect anomalies on assets management.
Additionally, IES will provide accurate 3D virtual building models for building and district level, which will help reduce the gap between the energy use of a building at the design stage and the actual operation.
Test Sites
- NZEB Smart House (Greece)
- Frederick University Campus (Cyprus)
- Office NZEB (Lithuania)
- Energy Community (Spain)
