A smart city should deploy a wide range of solutions to increase the energy efficiency and optimize the mobility within its borders while interacting with the different stakeholders: citizens, public authorities, researchers, etc. Due to this broad range of interventions developed by the European R&D community, the projects vary from focusing on very concrete technologies like serious gaming that aims to engage private consumers to covering the whole smart city chain in big lighthouse projects. All of them fall, of course, into the scope of the Smart Cities Information System (SCIS).
Back in May, when I was carrying out technical visits to project demo sites around Spain, I visited the technological centre TECNALIA that coordinates two very different projects in terms of interventions, illustrating two completely different approaches with the same goal – to develop the smart city of the future.
Meeting with the project coordinators of BERTIM (Building Energy Renovation through TImber Prefabricated Modules) and ZenN (Nearly Zero Energy Neighbourhoods) helped me to better understand how to approach the final deployment of the smart city from different perspectives.
And what are these perspectives?
BERTIM focuses on the renovation of a building by developing prefabricated modules. These prefabricated modules will help to improve not only the energy performance of the building with renovation work ensuring low intrusiveness, but also the air quality, aesthetics, comfort, and property value at the same time.
On the other hand, the ZenN project aims to reduce the energy use in existing buildings and neighbourhoods with near-zero renovation in order to demonstrate the feasibility of innovative low energy renovation processes for buildings at neighbourhood scale.
KUBIK
The on-site visit was especially interesting since I was able to see the KUBIK, a unique demonstration site that TECNALIA has developed as one of its laboratories for the research, development and implementation of sustainable, eco-efficient architecture and construction technologies.
In this singular infrastructure, the prefabricated modules of the BERTIM project are tested under different scenarios to be characterised and to optimize their behaviour. To simulate these different scenarios, the KUBIK not only has four facades with four different orientations - north, south, east and west, but also different workloads – electrical, heating, cooling loads – can be simulated under real conditions inside the KUBIK. The facades are properly prepared to connect the modules by an easy ‘plug & play’ process. Additionally, a full set of sensors are placed both on the façade and inside the KUBIK in order to easily characterize the prefabricated modules under different conditions. Very impressive!!!
Furthermore, the buildings that have been renovated in Eibar under the ZenN project were also presented in detail by the researchers from TECNALIA, with special focus on how the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are calculated from monitoring data.
One very interesting aspect of the visit was the explanation of the obstacles faced by the ZenN team in the process of installing the sensors in a proper way. Lack of space, access, and cost were the main issues. To solve these issues, innovative ways were developed to measure the energy flows fed into the different systems. The conversation with the technicians became very technical, especially when they explained how they manage the huge amount of data received from the sensors, with some readings below 1 minute!
This visit emphasized the importance of immersing ourselves in these projects to come to a better understanding of the different approaches necessary to develop the cities of the future.
About the author
M. Sc. Dipl.-Ing. Antonio Garrido Marijuán works as a Junior Scientist at the Energy Department of the AIT, and for the last eight months he has been supporting the development of the Smart Cities Information System. He graduated as Dipl.-Ing. in Chemical Engineering at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (Spain) and holds a M. SC on Industrial Technologies. Previously to AIT, he worked in the field of energy efficiency in buildings at the Spanish Research Centre for Energy, Environment and Technology (CIEMAT), where he represented CIEMAT for 4 years on the EERA-Joint Programme on Smart Cities.