This question is easy to ask, but very difficult to answer. If a person who does not know about self-consumption is informed, explaining that basically consists of putting a solar photovoltaic installation in your house and to use the energy that the sun gives us to generate the energy we use in our homes, the answer seems obvious.
In addition the energy generated is clean, since we avoid emitting CO2 to the planet and it is also free of charge. But there is nothing free in this world, everything has its price.
Surely many citizens have thought of taking the step of launching themselves to the generation of their own energy. The European Union encourages us through the recent “Clean Energy for all Europeans” initiative. This directive focused at the period 2021-2030 aims to support initiatives aimed at self-consumption so that citizens are their own energy generators.
This is where economic terms of investment and profitability appear, leading the citizen to ask oneself the first questions that may begin to discourage him.
How much does it cost to install my photovoltaic panels? How soon will I recover my initial investment? What do I do with my surplus energy? What happens in periods when there is no sun?
Firstly, we need space to place our panels. For example in Spain, 35% of the population that lives in single-family or semi-detached houses has it easy but the rest who live in flats already depends on other factors ,such as, their neighbours or space. However, in these matters where everybody is benefited, it is easier to reach an agreement.
Overcoming this stumbling block the next question is answered quickly. For an average citizen who consumes 3000 Kw / h by year, their problem could be easy resolved with an investment nearly of 6000 €. However in this case, it is necessary that our facility is connected to the grid and we can discharge the surplus to our power company or take power from the grid in case of imbalance. If we want to be totally grid isolated, the figure shoots to approximately 9000 €, because we will need batteries to store the surplus energy or be used in case of lack of sun. The investment recovery could be in the range of 10-20 years depending on the evolution of energy prices, taxes on self-consumption and other series of factors to take into account.
Nowadays in some countries like Spain, with the current regulation it is difficult to realize investments in self consumption that are efficient, due to a series of obstacles that should begin to be eliminated.
Self-consumption is not just putting photovoltaic panels on the roofs, but opens up a wide range of possibilities that should be allowed. To photovoltaic panels can be joined by other renewable sources of energy that make self-consumption become in another source of electricity generation and it is, at this moment, when new alternatives and questions appear.
Why not exchange energy with my neighbours? Why not obtain a profit from my surplus energy? Why does not my municipality generate its own electricity to supply, for example, street lighting? Will it someday be my building of zero energy or energy plus? Will I be able to charge my electric car?
Response to these issues may allow that our investment to start to be profitable but not only from the economic point of view but also social. Climate change is already a reality and everything whose aim is focused to reduce the burning of fossil fuels will be welcome.
From the self-consumption can be benefited all energy system actors, from electric companies, manufacturers of solar panels and batteries, installers, maintenance companies, engineering research centres and end users. Investment is also in the long term, the future of our planet.
All these and many other questions will have a clear answer in the coming years when the energy models change and we become aware that the past was never better.
One of the most important challenges that our society must face is how to transform our cities into more accessible, sustainable and efficient places. Our cities are, at this moment, in the very initial stages of this transformation, trying to get adapted to the new social challenges of the 21st century. To reach this ambitious objective, our cities have several plans for urban transformation, whose objectives while very interesting and ambitious, are far from being totally accepted by citizens as these lack of an essential aspect: integration. So we still have a long path in front of us.
The most important premise in this transformation process is that a city belongs to its citizens. It is essential to reinforce this motto, so that the citizens are at the center of this transformation process. Thus, as a direct consequence, any action to be deployed in a city must answer to its own identified challenges, following a city-led approach. And these, in turn, must have been identified considering their citizens’ concerns in a participatory process.
It must be added that in this process there are very good news. In order to implement this necessary transformation, we do not start from scratch. In almost any medium- or big-sized European city we can find medium- or long-term plans in the main sectors that regulate our lives in community. These plans are related to the built environment such as urban planning; the energy sector, with the energy plans, renewable energy deployment plans or the environmental sector in which many European cities have their own Sustainable Energy Action Plans to reduce emissions and their strategies to adapt to climate change with their Adaptation Plans. With respect to fostering efficient and sustainable mobility, we can find Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans. Finally, regarding economy and digitalization, we can find the Digital Agendas or Local Economic Development plans respectively.
On the contrary, the bad news are that all these plans are deployed in an isolated way, promoting very ambitious individual actions that pursue a high impact but lack of an integrated approach. Thus, the final impact is not as good as initially expected. The main remaining challenge is then to identify or establish interlinks and synergies among all these plans and this can only be achieved through a clear and well-structured analysis of the direct and indirect effects that each decision made will produce in the city and their citizens. Moreover, this integration would allow to prioritize all this actions set out in the existing plans following a holistic approach. The result of all this process would be a so-called integrated urban plan.
One of the most attractive aspects of the future cities is their transformation into economic engines, developing stable local economic ecosystems for investors and business. Ideally, this ecosystem will depend in a lesser extent on the exterior policies and will be based mainly on a sustainable local economy concept, always led by the city’s needs and strengthened with new digital services developed in a space of co-creation and co-design. Thus, again citizens are at the core of this process. As a consequence, strengthening this economic ecosystem and the industrial fabric of the city will increase its attractiveness, leading to the establishment of local talent and the development of new enterprises, especially under emerging business models; like entrepreneurship, start-ups and SMEs. This is the city business model.
The new generations of Lighthouse Smart City Projects, like our brand new mySMARTLife project, promote this new integrated vision towards a new city model. The concept of Innovative Urban Transformation promoted in mySMARTLife is based on the generation of comprehensive urban plans, which will allow a more efficient cityplanning, promoting the development of an urban transformation strategy based on strengthening the citizens’ engagement, developing a local economy ecosystem for the creation and maintenance of employment around the new city services that will result from the deployment of the integrated urban plan of the city.
The cities of Nantes (France), Hamburg (Germany), Helsinki (Finland), Varna (Bulgaria), Bydgoszcz (Poland), Rijeka (Croatia) and Palencia (Spain) have accepted to be part of this challenge.
But they are not alone. Dozens of cities throughout Europe and the rest of the world are already immersed in smart city projects, benefiting from the joint effort of researchers, companies and municipalities in finding solutions to their own challenges as cities.
In CARTIF, we are currently working with more than 100 European cities through our smart city projects. An exciting challenge. Would you like to be part of this transformation?
Have you ever wondered how a R&D project arises? How is it possible, for example, to be able to apply a photocatalytic treatment in the heart of a big city like Madrid? Ensuring respect of the environment through R&D requires a detailed plan of action, which involves many different actors and implies a very interesting four-phase sequence, to allow all the pieces fit.
Let’s see the recipe for success:
1) IDEA. Also known as the phase “Eureka!”. It is referred to that moment when, due to a known environmental issue, a company / organization / administration decides to contact a technological center to find a solution. Or, on the contrary, CARTIF researchers, on their continued commitment to update the state of the art of the technologies they develop, decide to look for a company committed to the environment to work on a new challenge.
2) APPLIED RESEARCH. It is named, in petit committee, as the phase “Let’s see what we have here”. Once the environmental issue to be addressed is identified, together with the science principles in which it is based on, it is time to decide how to apply them to the areas of demand. We have to use the generated knowledge by basic research and lead to the environmental problems selected in the phase of Idea. Here the purpose is always to produce technology for the development of the environmental issues addressed in the previous stage and the possibility of having additional aid, which supports part of the funding, can also be recommendable. These grants enable companies to address this phase with more resources and multiply, consequently, the scope of their results. Spanish calls of CDTI are well suited for this aim.
3) DEMONSTRATION. Also denominated “The time to act is now“. We know the scientific principles and we have checked that, at a laboratory level, the technology developed works. Then comes the time to expand the scale and test it at a higher level. For this phase, it is again very interesting to have the possibility of support from external financing. For instance, calls for proposals for LIFE Grants are the only EU financial instrument fully dedicated to the environment. Currently, there are 10 on-going LIFE projects running in CARTIF and the topics addressed are very diverse, do you know them?.
4) COMMUNICATION. At last but not least, it is important to publish the results obtained, because of that, this stage is named “shouting to the four winds”. Environmental awareness inevitably involves knowing on what work is being performed, the rate of progress, what improvements are being made and which companies are involved on the issue. Scientific publications and patents are a good starting point for us, as a technological center, but there are also other forms, such as environmental labels and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) to make visible which companies have a commitment with the environment.
Let us look at a successful example:
The problem of poor urban air quality due to environmental pollution by nitrogen oxides is an important environmental threat for the cities. Being able to reduce this issue is presented as a great challenge (phase: Eureka!). CARTIF participated in FENIX project few years ago, working actively, among other tasks, in the study, identification and selection of photocatalytic nanomaterials (phase: let’s see what we have here). Based on the good results achieved, some of the partners involved in this action decided to keep working and contacted the City of Madrid to increase the scale of the research and to ask for applying the developed treatment in the streets of the city centre (phase: the time to act is now). After that, LIFE EQUINOX, a R&D project began, coordinated by CARTIF, in October 2013, and it is still in progress (phase: shouting to the four winds).
Let us not forget, therefore, that it will always be better not to put the cart before the horse.
“Cities are no more than ecosystems that consume resources and transform them to produce outputs as services, goods or waste” says Richard Rogers in his book “Cities for a Small Planet”. Certainly, sustainability of these complex ecosystems depends on our capability to reduce the non-renewable sources consumption, waste production or the various means of contamination (atmospheric, light or acoustic), as well as on establishing circular strategies that allow generating new resources based on the produced wastes.
On the other hand, the technology development (that happens mostly in cities) provokes that we have an increasingly important new resource, which is the information through data, generated by citizens and the systems they use. Perhaps this source was not considered in the Rogers’ ecosystem (or at least not as important as it is now) which he said that should be circular and therefore reduce its dependency on external sources and the production of wastes as output. But there is no doubt on that, under this new industrial revolution that we are witnessing, “data is the new oil” (as David Buckingham, President at AIMIA Shopper Insights, says), whose refinement, exploitation and transformation into services allows improving the citizens’ quality of life.
Coming back to Rogers’ text, in the prologue to the Spanish version, who was the Mayor of Barcelona between 1982 and 1997, Pasqual Maragall, wrote that “my city is imposed as an indisputable evidence, the environment of everything, or almost everything that happens to me, the greatest place among all I can modify, about which I can really influence, physically, and not only through the fiction of the vote”.
It is difficult to establish an accepted definition of what a Smart City is, and even more agreeing how to measure it, but it is indubitable that the basis of the city of the future has its ground on these three ingredients that Rogers, Buckingham and Maragall state, where if we mix them we find out that in the challenge of transforming the city –understanding that every action will have an impact on its performance–, we need to work on improving the efficiency of its ecosystem –making it more sustainable–, and integrating this important source which is data to provide to citizens new and improved services to turn their day-to-daymore efficient as well. At the end, a city can’t be smart if we are not making a smart use of it and its resources.
Furthermore, undeniably, the Smart concept is trendy, and it is not only the city understanding that new mechanisms should be implemented to improve this ecosystem, but among the citizens, there is an increasing demand and use of smart technology solutions. Now, the challenge is on finding the balance among these two axes, which should converge on transforming the urban environment into a smarter and more sustainable place to live and work by agreeing those that plan it and those that are already making a smart use of sources and services.
Many of these concepts have been evident in the Smart City Expo and World Congress in Barcelona, which has been again postulated as main fora among cities, industry and citizens in this year’s edition, where all these stakeholders have gathered to learn under a Congress that this year was entitled “Cities for Citizens” which could not better summarise the ideas that this post try to share.
This was a “must” event for our Smart City projects, where we have been able to share the urban regeneration processes that we are implementing in the 16 cities in which our projects R2CITIES, CITyFiED, REMOURBAN and mySMARTLife are working, through actions in the convergence area of energy efficiency, smart and sustainable mobility and ICTs that we are implementing.
In the European Commission, there is a clear interest in improving the energy and environmental conditions of the building sector, and to reduce the impact of this sector in terms of energy consumption and CO2 emissions. That interest is materialized in funding several research and demonstration projects that go in this direction. One of these projects is iNSPiRe.
Last month it was held in Brussels the final meeting of iNSPiRe, bittersweet moment, because on one hand we were assuming the farewell of many colleagues of the 24 partners involved in the project and on the other hand meant a great satisfaction because finally, after 4 years of hard work, we were collecting the results coming from many conferences, many meetings and countless reports.
The iNSPiRe project is aligned with the ambitious European directive on energy performance in buildings which aims to achieve the reduction of energy consumption in buildings both in the residential sector and the tertiary sector. In this demonstrative project in addition to defining a process of renovation of buildings to reduce their energy consumption, they have been also developed highly efficient and innovative technological kits, with the aim of putting them on the market as future upgrades to the systems currently used in buildings renovation projects of the construction industry. In this way the building demo-sites have acted as the best testing bench for these kits. Different kits have been developed as a solution for multiple systems as kits for energy distribution or kits for envelopes and facades with innovative solutions for energy storage and energy generation systems.
As mentioned, all technological solutions developed within the iNSPiRe project have been installed on two demonstrators. One of them is located in Madrid, Spain, and the other in the German city of Ludwigsburg and both buildings belong to the residential sector. Both the data obtained from monitored buildings and the simulation data will be used for the creation of a common database that will serve professionals in engineering and architecture, as well as local authorities to inform them of the most efficient and cost-effective resources in a deep renovation of buildings.
Within CARTIF in this project we have been responsible for the tasks of monitoring, follow-up and analysis of the indicators that allow the verification of the optimum performance of the installed solutions and verify that the tenants reach comfort conditions. The first objective covered was the definition and design of a monitoring system that would allow the assessment of energy savings and to know the performance of the buildings before and after the renovation and rehabilitation process. In addition, CARTIF developed a surveillance software that show us when one of the solutions is not working properly, a situation the software interprets through the information collected from multiple sensors installed in the demo-sites. CARTIF’s work has always been closely linked to the business partners developers of technology kits one, as our role has also been to inform them of the correct performance and efficiency of their developments.
To carry out the evaluation of energy savings, both demo-sites have been monitored for two years in two periods, one year before refurbishment and one year afterwards, with the aim of identifying their behavior before and after and obtain a base line for comparison. For this task four groups of indicators were defined: comfort, electrical consumption, heating demand and finally emissions. Apart from those, economic indicators have been also defined but due to the timings on the kits installation, this indicator has not been already studied.
Regarding the results, although we have not been able to make a savings analysis, we have made a comparative study of the performance of the buildings in the two monitoring periods. Once the data from all kits are available it will be possible to make more in-depth valuations.
In the Energy Area of CARTIF we are committed to help transforming our living environments into more sustainable and energy efficient ones, and our work and outcomes of the iNSPiRe project will impact in this direction.
The Taoist philosophy defines through the Ying and Yang duality, that has everything that exists in the universe, so that there are always two antagonistic and complementary forces that need each other. You can hardly appreciate the value of the Peace without the existence of wars or health if there were no diseases.
This dual approach is also applicable to technology, imposing conditions that often are opposite, but allow the balance of systems. According to the Thermodynamics, for the production of cold (heat extraction to a source of lower temperature) has to provide external power and dissipate heat to a medium that is hotter than the area you want to cool, so that the heat and cold coexist like the Ying and Yang were addressed.
The conditions of habitability that living beings we have, they require us to maintain a suitable temperature to carry out life processes, in such a way that values at 23 ° C environment, they allow us to be comfortable. However the weather and outdoor conditions present values sometimes far removed from this optimum: from – 40 ° C, which can be in areas close to the Poles, up to 55 ° C which can be summer in areas close to the Equator being essentially the presence or absence of solar radiation which causes these differences.
Technology has developed systems for the transformation of solar energy into heat or electricity, making it applicable to both heating and cooling. The absence of solar radiation produces the need for heating, and therefore it seems unlikely that we can take advantage of the available radiation that will generally be small for heating. However, the need to cold will be generally associated with the presence of sunlight, as if they were also of the Ying and Yang. In fact the air conditioning is one of them technologies star for the World Football Championship of Qatar in which is going to use fields of soccer refrigerated through energy solar (“Wolfgang Kessling: “How to air-condition outdoor spaces”).
The solar cooling offers a set of technologies in which the solar radiation is used to produce coldwater with sorbents systems (absorption or adsorption machines) previously heated with solar panels or from electricity produced with photovoltaic solar energy to power a system based on compressor. As if they were the brothers of “Rich man, poor man”, their temporal evolution has been and is different.
Until makes some 10 years, were the systems of cold solar based in machines sorbent which had of a greater number of applications and developments technological. In those days the photovoltaic face was expensive. However, with the reduction of the cost that has suffered recently this last, the use of photovoltaic to produce cold solar is increasing of way important. On the other hand, there are manufacturers of machines of absorption with systems of triple effect and yields of the 180% willing to present a hard battle for the air conditioning with radiation solar.
In any case regardless of the technology that is winner, I have clear is that, the future of the cold is hot, as hot as the Sun.
