MEMAP

Building technology receives more and more attention in the last years to improve energy efficiency and save money. It is recognized as a significant driving factor to make the next step towards improved energy efficiency in Germany, especially, in combination with renewable energy resources. Current buildings with energy supply technology, be it photovoltaics, solar thermic heat production, combined heat and power (CHP), heat pumps and also cooler equipment is installed with a larger capacity than required during the most time of the year. Consequently, the full potential is seldom used. Most of the time the equipment it operated in a non-optimal energy efficiency range. Storage equipment for thermal energy and electric power increase the efficiency locally, but the dimensioning of the components is a difficult task. The architects and engineers often suggest solutions, which lead to overcapacities that are costly and cannot be used optimally during different times of the year.

To improve the described state of practice, the MEMAP project tackles the challenge with two new approaches. Firstly, a Multi Energy Management and Aggregation Platform (MEMAP) is developed and evaluated in a real field test. Its goal is to improve the situation by exchanging non-used potentials in neighborhood areas. This involves information and communication technologies and the physical interconnection of the neighborhood. The idea involves multiple steps. As a first step, local EMS systems are digitally interconnected. This allows an evaluation of their energy potentials. After that, we investigate the best way to interconnect the neighborhood and calculate the improvement with respect to energy efficiency. The second contribution is to transfer the findings to current planning tools and methodologies. This involves that real data of building usage is used in planning tools that work with BIM to calculate a better energy efficiency and also that the context of the neighborhood is considered, if building technology is exchanged and new equipment is installed. All findings will be evaluated and explored with field tests and real data.

The project's aim is to develop and evaluate an open platform for the aggregation of potential energy flexibility and its collaborative usage within a neighborhood area. The platform will interconnect different EMSs to allow different buildings to offer their overcapacity, evaluate their value for the neighborhood and distribute the energy within the system based on the offers and demands. For the interconnection, we will implement the OPC UA standard and investigate other standards and methods for transactions as well.

The platform is used to generate enough data to improve planning tools as well. The planning process benefits by two important contributions. Firstly, the platform delivers real building usage data that can be used to compare the planned and the real behavior data of the building. This improves calculations for architects and system planers. Secondly, the planer can make much better predictions of the energy usage in a neighborhood if the platform provides him the data for available local energy potential, such as heat and electric power. He can use the data, e.g. in a tool with BIM (Building Information Model).

You can find a comprehensive analysis of the project and its positioning on the energy turnaround in the special "Realising sustainable neighbourhoods" (German, PDF download) of the magazine "heizungsjournal".

Federal Ministry of Economy Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK), Research grant number: 3ET1413

01.07.2017 - 30.09.2021