Challenged by climate change and coupled with the need to secure sustainable economic growth and social cohesion, Europe must achieve a genuine energy revolution to reverse present-day unsustainable trends and live up to the ambitious policy expectations. A rational, consistent and far-sighted approach to heating and cooling is key for ensuring such transformation. Toward this direction, district heating and cooling systems need to be more efficient, intelligent and cheaper.
The InDeal project (Innovative technology for district heating and cooling) is a project funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (topic: H2020-EE-2015-2-RIA) of the European Union under grant agreement No. 696174. The InDeal project team is comprised by leading organizations in their respective fields from across the European Union. The project is coordinated by City University of London and the consortium consists of 11 organizations from eight EU member states: NAITEC (Spain), Centre for Research and Technology Hellas, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), IZNAB Sp. z o.o. (Poland), Center for Technology Research and Innovation (Cyprus), Net Technologies Finland, PROMAR Ltd. (Poland), Energetika Projekt d.o.o. (Slovenia), Syndicat national du chauffage urbain et de la climatisation urbaine (France) and SERM Société d'Équipement de la Region Montpelliéraine (France).
The project brings together a number of organisations from varying areas such as control and machine learning experts, software developers, experts in system integration and district heating and cooling services providers, to solve a number of technological challenges (i.e. distribution of heating and cooling, network monitoring and control, energy prediction) that relate to a cluster of industries in many sectors (district heating and cooling, software, energy efficiency, intelligent meters, etc.).
InDeal project will offer an innovative platform that will impose a fairly distribution of heating and cooling among the network’s substations by:
- real–time energy consumption data gathering via artificial intelligent meters
- identifying and evaluating the network’s need and demand for heating and cooling depending to energy efficiency, energy consumption and type of building
- predicting the short-term weather conditions and forthcoming need for heating and cooling
- monitoring the level of energy stored in network’s storage stations and substations
- 24/7 monitoring and control of the district heating and cooling system by a central control platform
- developing energy harvesting solutions to enable future deployment of autonomous sensors and
- minimizing heat losses via novel pipe design solutions and innovative insulation materials
The target of InDeal is to turn the current district heating and cooling networks into a new next-level automated networks that will guarantee increase of the overall energy efficiency accomplishing a fairly distribution of heating and cooling energy demands. InDeal will make a significant step forward contributing to wider use of intelligent district heating and cooling systems and smart integration of renewables, waste and storage.
Contact information:
Professor Nicos Karcanias
Professor Emeritus in Systems and Control Engineering
City University, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB, United Kingdom
Email: N.Karcanias@city.ac.uk
This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme