ÌǹûÅɶÔ

Project Description

Around 40% of all energy consumed in the EU is used in buildings, and over one-third of the EU’s CO2 emissions come from this sector. Notably, 85% of EU buildings were constructed before 2000, and among those, 75% are classified as having poor energy performance. Therefore, improving the energy efficiency of buildings is key to saving energy and achieving a zero-emission, fully decarbonized building stock by 2050. To address this issue, the revised EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive mandates that all non-residential buildings with an effective rated output for heating or combined space heating and ventilation systems of over 290 kW must be equipped with building energy management systems by 2025, buildings with systems of 70 kW by 2029. This creates an urgent need for cost-effective building energy management solutions that will enable building owners across Europe to comply with the new requirements.

This project addresses this urgent need by delivering IoT-Building-Cloud, an affordable, scalable intelligent building energy management system that leverages state-of-the-art IoT and Cloud computing technologies to deliver a cost-effective solution.

The aim of the project is to 1) enable the IoT-Building-Cloud solution to scale to thousands of buildings, and 2) develop a Go-To-Market strategy that will enable the startup company to onboard one thousand buildings within the first 3 years, equivalent to an approximately annual turnover of 20 million DKK.

To achieve its aim the project must 1) extend the current version of IoT-Building-Cloud with a customer portfolio management system that supports scaling to thousands of buildings by providing management functionality for monitoring and reporting on the IoT-Building-Cloud energy management systems for the individual customers, and 2) identify a business model for Go-To-Market that finds the right tradeoff between customer value-proposition, sale prices, distribution channels and a cost-structure that supports a fast market growth rate.

The project is based on the innovative IoT-Cloud platform OACIS - Optimal Auto-Configuration of IoT Sensors, developed by ÌǹûÅÉ¶Ô Center for Energy Informatics as part of the EUDP funded project ‘CELSIUS - Cost-effective Large-scale IoT Solutions for Energy-Efficient Medium- and Large-sized Buildings'. OACIS delivers an innovative scanning-based installation approach, utilizing QR codes, that revolutionizes the installation process of IoT sensors and smart thermostats in both existing and new buildings by removing the labor-intensive need for building-specific programming of sensors and thermostats as part of the installation process. This effectively eliminates the many costly programming errors that are typical for existing building management systems from companies like for instance Schneider and Siemens, where technicians must program each sensor and thermostat into the system. Hence, OACIS enables the cost-effective installation of IoT sensors and smart thermostats in both existing and newly constructed buildings, reaching potential energy savings of 10 – 20%

Unique to this project is the innovative approach of the OACIS platform to support automatic configuration of large-scale IoT sensor and smart thermostat installations in buildings based on QR codes. The auto-configuration capability sets this project apart from other building energy management systems on the market, as it eliminates the labor-intensive and error-prone need for building-specific programming tasks that existing building energy management systems require. Consequently, the project creates value by facilitating a cost-effective installation process for sensors and thermostats.

Project Summary