Even though the term Geographic Information System (GIS) is well-known, it is possible that many of you don’t know what applications it might have or its relevance in the energy field. Put in short, GIS (or SIG, in Spanish) are all software in charge of the treatment of data containing some geometric characteristic and that can be reflected on a map in their precise position. These data can be 2D or 2,5D* (described with points, lines and polygons), 3D, or cloud points (LIDAR data). Moreover, these geographic data are normally associated to attribute tables, where information on them is introduced. For example, we can have a map with the provinces in Spain and in the attribute table have assigned to each polygon representing a province their demographic data, economic data, etc.
One of the most remarkable aspects of these systems is not only being able to visualize elements in their precise geographic location, but also that these layers of information can be overlapped allowing to visualize at the same time geographical elements displaying different realities. This is quite straightforward and we are very used to seeing it in phone apps, for example GPS apps, where we can observe a base map (a city map or a satellite image) and several layers that are placed on top of it, such as the name of the streets, stores, etc.
A part from being able to use these systems in order to guide ourselves in cities (which is no small thing) the potential of these systems lies in being able to perform spatial analysis, which would be impossible with other means. This way, we could have answers to questions like the following:
What would be the floodable areas by this river?
If an incident occurs in this area, which are the closest hospitals? What would be the best route for ambulances with respect to distance? And with respect to time?
Where should the stops of this bus line be placed in order for them to be spaced at a maximum of 600 meters? Which areas in the city would benefit from it considering a radius from the bus stop of 10 minutes walking?
How have forest areas been modified in a concrete zone? Is there risk of desertification?
These only represent a small sample of the reach of GIS, which proves extremely useful to carry out planning activities in a wide range of fields (risks and accidents, traffic management, transport networks, environmental impact assessment, agriculture, natural risk assessment…). But focusing on the energy field, GIS have also a great potential for the support in the development of energy plans, compliance with energy directives and result monitoring. For example, we could get to know which areas are in need to perform an energy retrofit. To this respect it is worth mentioning as an example the map developed by the University of Columbia on the estimated consumption in New York City.
Additionally, several different scenarios can be evaluated where the effectiveness of the different actions is measures or if a determined area can be supplied by other type of energy source (renewable, for example). Calculating these indicators it can be checked if the objectives imposed in a determined directive are complied with or not.
In CARTIF, and in particular in the Energy Division, GIS are exploited and their applications to support to the compliance with the European Directives in the energy field, more specifically to the Directive package “Clean Energy for All Europeans”. Moreover, special attention is paid to the study of the data structure and the standards that should be followed to assure its interoperability. In this sense, it is worth highlighting the open standards proposed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), and also the INSPIRE Directive, which defines the infrastructure for the spatial information in Europe and which will be applicable in 2020.
This latter aims at harmonising and offering geospatial information in Europe in a range of 34 themes. Even though none of them is strictly related to energy (these aspects can be assigned to build elements, such as buildings (BU)), the study of the most relevant energy attributes is crucial in this moment prior to the implementation of the INSPIRE Directive, as it has been manifested by the European Commission when defining a project that studies the potential of the Directive in the energy field: the “Energy Pilot”. CARTIF, aiming for innovation and the alignment with the EU collaborates in this project interacting with one of the reference centres of the Commission: the Joint Research Centre in Ispra.
*Note for the curious: for example a cube can be considered 2,5D when it is defined instead of with eight vertexes with x, y and z values, it is defined only with the four above, since those contain the “z” value in contrast to the four lower vertexes, where this value would be 0.
In the subject of self-consumption there is a concept that we must never forget: energy efficiency. This efficiency must be understood from both the generation and consumption sides.
Let us first analyze efficiency from the point of consumer. It is evident that if my household consumes less electricity, the cost of my self-consumption facility will be lower. Are we taking any measure of efficiency for this to occur? A first step that can be taken is to reduce the consumption of lighting in the home. The change of halogen and low consumption bulbs by others of LED technology will allow us to reduce enough the electricity consumption in lighting. Another step that we can take is to replace our old appliances with others of class A +++ that have a lower level of consumption.
Efficient measures that are not always within reach of most budgets are to improve the isolation of our home. The insulation of the envelope of the building is fundamental. The use of insulation in facades, ceilings and floors and a suitable choice of windows can reduce the consumption of our building.
Other measures simply go through the change of habits in consumption that we must learn if we want to implement self-consumption in the home. The simple gesture of turning off light bulbs or electrical appliances that are not used, to avoid to leave electronic devices in stand.by (phantom energy) and to put the appliances in operation in the hours of the day when more energy is generated will allow an efficient management of our system. This can be done by implementing energy management software (EMS) in our home but it is an added cost.
If we are thinking about buying an electric car maybe this is the time to choose it with V2G (Vehicle to grid) technology with its Vehicle to Home (V2H) and Vehicle to Building (V2B) variants. This technology allows energy stored in an electric car to be injected into the electrical grid or to a dwelling or building using the car battery as an electrical storage system. In this way a better integration of renewable energies can be achieved in the electrical system.
Perhaps these measures will allow a home to consume only 1500 kw/h a year compared to the current 3000 kw/h of average consumption in Spain. This would reduce the cost of our self-consumption facility which would mean that many households will consider doing this installation in their homes.
From the point of view of the generation side, progress is being made by leaps and bounds. The efficiency of existing photovoltaic panels that use new materials with a longer useful life is very far from those manufactured 10 years ago and the price per w is lower, reaching values of 0.8 € per watt installed. Equally, the technology of the batteries makes them more efficient and with a greater durability supporting greater cycles of recharge and at a lower price.
And is the electricity grid ready for self-consumption? According to the operator of the Spanish electricity system the network is prepared for hundreds of thousands of self-consumers to enter the network.
What are the electric companies doing? Power companies are realizing that self-consumption will sooner or later arrive to settle permanently in each of our homes and that is the time has come to move ahead. Some companies start to market self-consumption kits, control systems or maintenance contracts that ensure a proper functioning of the system.
What is necessary so that everything starts to work? As easy as getting to an agreement point where distributors (power companies) begin to see prosumers (current users and future producers) as potential allies and non-competitors.
On the one hand, the electricity companies claim that the use of the distribution network should be paid not only by the current consumer but by the future producer and as we know these costs represent more than 50% of the current electricity tariff. But it is also true that companies are going to save the generation costs that are difficult to know at present.
But what would happen if a large number of users decide to become only their own power generators and definitely disconnect from the network? And it is then when the government enters and depending on the laws that apply and according to on whether they are advantageous for the consumer, the companies or both when the consumer decides.
Urban mobility is paramount to address cities’ sustainable regeneration due to the number of issues that derive from a non-sustainable and non-efficient urban transport strategy. Urban transport represents almost a quarter of all the EU transport CO2 emissions. Conventional fuel vehicles contribute to the 40% of the city pollution, leading both to environmental damage and severe illnesses.
The challenge is to identify and analyze the best strategies to introduce clean technologies within an urban environment aligning with the city transport plans and policies and complying with the citizens’ needs.
Valladolid city has a strong commitment with sustainable transport and electromobility, as it is inferred from the list of measures taken at city level and their participation in a number of smart city projects at national and European level.
One of the most remarkable ones is REMOURBAN (REgeneration MOdel for accelerating the smart URBAN transformation) that is implementing a number of actions with the aim of boosting even more the penetration of electric mobility in Valladolid city.
Before REMOURBAN:
The largest share of public city transport in Valladolid is covered by the buses fleet, which consists of 103 PLG fuelled, 46 biodiesel, and one hybrid (non plug-in) Additionally, there are currently 466 taxis operating along the city. Among them, there are several hybrids (non plug-in) and others PLG fuelled. There are also two FEV, the first one operating since December 2011.
Mobility actions to be deployed within REMOURBAN project:
Though not fully deployed, most of the foreseen actions are already in progress.
Five plugged-in hybrid buses have been in operation for one year now. Two of them have been partially funded through REMOURBAN project.
Two FEV cars belonging to the City Hall private fleet are also providing service.
Additionally, a set of 45 fully electric vehicles (taxis, last mile delivery and other private business) are expected to arrive soon. To achieve this ambitious target, the City Hall has launched an interesting offer to boost the adoption of electric vehicles by these professionals. Interested parties will be able to apply as long as they commit to monitor the performance of their electric vehicles and related charging infrastructure. In return they will be getting as much as 8.350€ along 24 months.
Charging infrastructure has also been duly considered and the 34 slow charging points currently available all along the city will be soon upgraded and integrated in a remote management system to allow for seamless and reliable monitoring. Moreover, new charging infrastructure is being put in place to ensure fast charging to the buses and last mile delivery vehicles. In this sense, two pantographs (120kW) have also been installed at the beginning and end of bus line 7, and are currently being commissioned. They will provide the required electricity for their batteries so as to cover the inner area of the city in fully electric mode. The charging process should take around 8 minutes.
The freight delivery vehicles will profit from a fast charging station (50kW) that will also be installed in CENTROLID logistics hub. Last but not least, 4 additional charging points (22kW, Schuko, Mennekes) will be installed to provide charging to the taxis (not exclusively).
Monitoring actions:
A local ICT platform, in Valladolid, will be managed by CARTIF and further on will feed a global one for the whole project. Everything is being currently set up in order to get ready to register data, both from vehicles performance and from charging processes once the vehicles are in place. This is expected to happen by the beginning of year 2018 and will allow for two years monitoring (as requested by the EC).
On-board Units (provided and installed by GMV) will be registering a number of variables (speed, electric instantaneous engine consumption, battery level, instantaneous auxiliary systems consumption, GPS, emissions, etc.) that relate only to vehicle performance while on route. Additionally, data from charging processes will be collected by a charging manager. This will consist of initial and final charging time, as well as related charging energy.
Information from each monitored vehicle will come from both sources (driving route and charging process). The related set of data will be anonymized and processed by the local platform.
The final aim is to get valuable knowledge from electric vehicles performance in real conditions. All lessons learnt and experience gained will be transferred to other cities willing to adopt these technologies.
Traditionally, factors that were taken into account in manufacturing processes were economic, management, production, etc. However, this situation has changed in recent years. Energy efficiency and sustainable management are fundamental aspects that many companies have incorporated in their processes. Aware of that reality, CARTIF is accompanying the companies to incorporate in them the “Factories of Future” concept. An example of work done is the REEMAIN project.
REEMAIN moves toward zero carbon manufacturing and Energy Efficiency 2.0 through the intelligent use of renewable energy technologies and resource saving strategies that consider energy purchase, generation, conversion, distribution, utilization, control, storage, re-use in a holistic and integrated way.
In addition to that, REEMAIN project has provided us with the opportunity to expand our knowledge and experience in the Resource and Energy Efficient Manufacturing world. During the demonstration actions at the factories, the team has experimented energy and materials saving technologies and process and, of course, tested their effectiveness.
As the project comes to an end, we have produced a Best Practices Book as a way of sharing our experience with other professionals in the material and energy efficiency manufacturing domain.
The REEMAIN Best Practice Book summarises the key findings from our experience of over four years working on the project and are recommendations we make to the overall community involved in this kind of projects (designers, research institutions, factory owners, workers, contractors, public bodies, investors, etc.), in order to provide a help if some of them decide to get involve in an efficiency improvement project within a factory.
18 Best Practices are featured. They were based on our experience while searching and testing efficiency measures in our three demo factories: GULLON (Biscuit), BOSSA (Textile) and SCM (Iron & Steel). Three main thematic areas had been identified: Best practices on “design”, best practices on “Operation and maintenance” and “Exploitation & Dissemination”.
Each of them is presented in a short and visual way. They are composed of: title, description (being itself a recommendation), stakeholders, replicability, practical guidelines and things to avoid, impact rating, and finally the REEMAIN practical experience.
I have tried my best to avoid starting this post with the awarded as the most-used-ever sentence in this sort of texts that states that “buildings account for a 40% of the energy consumption and the 36% of the GHG emissions” but the fact is that it is good starting point when writing about buildings and energy. To tell the truth, in this field, with the unsustainable energy consumption rates, CO2 and other contaminants emissions, and their still too low improvement trends, everyone knows that a 40% is much more than we can afford.
When searching for reasons, it is more than evident that there is a moment in which the architecture is somehow decontextualized; losing its connection with the environment and nature, and the so called “international” style defends architecture valid for every place, where machines solve all those aspects that have not been solved during the design. But in 1973 a reality check came, and an unprecedented crisis saw the first laws about energy and the first awareness campaigns were launched. Once the energy “free-for-all” was ended, it was time to think of how to reduce the energy consumption but without affecting comfort in all its levels.
In that moment, after the effects of the crisis, architecture had a great opportunity to self-reinvent and introduce into its principles (those from Vitrubio, Le Corbusier or whatever fundaments the design process of every architect) the energy efficiency. Sigfired Giedion (Space, Time, and Architecture, 1941) states that “architecture is intimately linked to the life of an age in all its aspects (…). When an age tries to hide, its actual nature will be transparent through its architecture”. Thus, in my humble opinion, the last quarter of the 20th Century will be characterised by a strange mix of three tendencies: a magazine architecture far from understanding that the energy sources are limited; the housing bubble (this bubble could be issue for more than one post), also far; and a third movement that looks behind to find the origin of the architecture and searching to be adapted to climate while taking advantage of the latest technical developments. The two first (and many other factors, let’s avoid putting the blame only on construction) made that the 73s crisis has reappeared –or perhaps it never went– into what we know today as “energy poverty”, that has been set up to affect sectors of society that didn’t seem to be that vulnerable in the gold years of the bubble.
And, being realistic, with a necessarily low tax of new construction, and with a building stock that suffers the consequences of the above, make that energy retrofitting is one of our best “weapons” in the fight against climate change while, at the same time, one of the main opportunities for the construction sector, so hardly penalised in the recent years. But the problem with this is found on the “agnosticism” that has been set up around energy savings, which still are not understood as an economic, social and environmental benefit. It is, thus, our responsibility (read here the technicians of the construction sector) to quantify and valorise these benefits so that financial institutions, public bodies, companies of the sector and specially users, demand energy efficiency in buildings not as an extra, but as a must.
In CARTIF we have been working during years in the sector of energy efficient retrofitting and, specially, in quantifying and valorising energy savings to make of them a guarantee both economic and social. Thus, projects like OptEEmAL, about which we have already talked in this blog, work capturing all the knowledge that we have generated these years when developing methodologies to evaluate these issues and offer tools that support this change of paradigm: from establishing approaches of collaborative work and risk sharing during the design and execution, to the support in the informed decision-making to all stakeholders involved through the use of modelling and simulation tools.
All in all, we only aim at recover the relevance of the energy efficiency as project mechanism in architecture, what could make Vitrubio reformulating its principles as firmitas, utilitas, venustas et navitas efficientum.
‘Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another’. This is the most commonly known formulation of the First Principle of Thermodynamics. However, we often forget that energy is degraded to a greater or lesser extent when it undergoes any transformation in the real world. Consequently, the quality of it is not the same for every of their possible forms and neither it is the level of usefulness for a given process or application.
There are evident differences between the energy flow of 1 MWh of heat at 90 C produced by a biomass boiler and 1 MWh of residual heat at 40 C coming from the industrial activity in a factory. The first one can supply numerous applications (space heating, domestic hot water supply, etc.) while the second one cannot be directly used for almost none of these uses and it is often considered as losses rejected to the environment.
The ‘guilty’ agent that causes such difference is exergy. Exergy is a term of renewed relevance these days among the concerns of engineers, technicians, policy-makers, etc. which represents the fraction of an energy flow capable of producing work, of producing a useful effect. In other words, exergy is the ‘juice’ that we really should extract from energy.
Residual heat coming out from the factory (although to a lesser extent than that one produced by the biomass boiler) also attains such potential, and wasting it involves luxuries that our society cannot afford.
In this sense, how we use energy in buildings, industries, etc. should address two main challenges: (i) producing more efficient energy transformations that will minimize its degradation, and (ii) exploiting exergy fluxes contained in low-grade energy forms that are otherwise rejected.
In CARTIF, we develop our activity in line with these objectives through our participation in different R&D projects.
One clear example of this is the LowUP project(‘Low valued energy sources UPgrading for buildings and industry uses’), leaded by the company ACCIONA and where our research center plays a remarking role, both collaborating in the leadership of different tasks as well as providing our technical experience in simulation, control, monitoring and instrumentation of energy systems.
The LowUP project is developing 3 efficient alternative systems to supply heating and cooling for building and industries, based on the use of renewable free energy and heat recovery from low-grade residual energy sources that are currently wasted. The 3 systems will be tested through 4 demonstrations in relevant environments. It involves the participation of 17 diverse partners from 7 countries seeking for the improvement and integration of several individual systems for energy production, storage and final use. As a result, these technologies will contribute to significantly reducing CO2 emissions and primary energy consumption thus creating greater energy efficiency in buildings.
After 6 months since the launch of the project, we hosted in our premises the first General Assembly of theLowUP Project, which turned to be a complete success. During the meeting, the partners presented the first advances, focused on the detailed revision of integration designs, the definition of requirements for operation, control and monitoring, as well as those first technological developments and prototypes.
Therefore, from CARTIF, we encourage all of you to follow our steps and do your bit to keep extracting the ‘juice’ from energy, without giving up trying to catch even that last tiny drop 😉
