The SIM4Blocks European project held its kick-off meeting on 5 and 6 April 2016 in Stuttgart, Germany. A consortium of 17 European partners (including 3 Swiss organisations) have answered the H2020-EE-2015-2-RIA call for proposals for:

… real time optimisation of energy demand, storage and supply (including self-production when applicable) using intelligent energy management systems with the objective of reducing the difference between peak power demand and minimum night time demand, thus reducing costs and greenhouse gas emissions. …

The official, “long” title of the project is Simulation Supported Real Time Energy Management in Building Blocks. Led by the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart, the 5.5 MEUR project will:

… develop innovative demand response (DR) services for smaller residential and commercial customers, implement and test these services in three pilot sites and transfer successful DR models to customers of project partners in further European countries. …

The kick-off meeting was held in the traditional manner: after an introduction by the coordinator, and a short (remote) intervention by our project officer, each work package leader presented their work packages, going through the tasks that were defined, clarifying questions and making sure we had a common understanding of what was to be done.

Neurobat’s part will consist in offering our online heating optimisation server in order to help the manager of a group of buildings optimise the timing of the operation of their heat pumps. The goal is to avoid excessive peak power, for example when all pumps run at the same time.

One the second day we went north to the Wüstenrot village, where a cluster of single family houses (and a couple of commercial buildings) draw their heating power from what some call an energy ring, a cold water circuit from which the heat pumps draw the heat for each building. This will be one of three pilot sites, the other two being in Spain and in Switzerland.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 695965. It will last four years and we are honored to have been invited to join it. We look forward to a successful collaboration with the other members of the consortium.