Four years after project launch, AMBASSADOR research project presents its developments for energy efficient districts

Grenoble, October 5th 2016

The AMBASSADOR project will end by end of October after 4 years of research on energy for Smart Districts. 15 partners have been contributing to the results of the project, with an overall budget of 10 MEUR, and 6.5 MEUR funding from European Commission in the frame of FP7 framework.

The major objective of the AMBASSADOR project was to develop energy solutions for Smart Districts, both for electric and district heating networks. In addition to technology developments, works have been dedicated to better capture business aspects, understand who the actors in place are, and what the very first business opportunities that are foreseen.

The overall concept of AMBASSADOR is giving the opportunity to any organization in the District to define and implement optimization strategies serving its business objectives. Depending on the organization profile, the business objective can be energy cost optimization, CO2 emissions reduction, self consumption, increased resiliency, or a combination of different objectives.

In addition to the business objective of each single organization, AMBASSADOR has developed a system introducing coordination at district level: the District Energy Management and Information System. The DEMIS coordinates each actor of the district, in order to implement a new mission for the whole district.

In the very early stages of the project, the business framework was defined providing structural inputs to system architecture and control. In the case of a private campus, all assets and buildings are owned by a single organization. Thus one can concentrate all the necessary knowledge in a single controller which will decide the optimal strategy for the campus. Another business case much more challenging is the “local utility” business case where the system needs to consider multiple organization, without being intrusive. This brings strong constraints to the DEMIS that needs to coordinate sub-systems without any information on the nature of the sub-system.

Solution demonstration and potentials evaluation have been conducted through three demonstration sites and a dedicated District Simulation Platform. The demonstration sites are BedZED in Sutton, UK – CEA Ines in Chambéry, France and the Lavrion Technological and Cultural Park in Lavrion, Greece. The solution has been deployed on two of the demonstration sites. The District Simulation Platform and the BedZED demonstration site have been used through simulation in order to evaluate solution potentials.

The solutions developed within AMBASSADOR have demonstrated that flexibility is key in the process of energy optimization. Flexibility embedded into the systems will be exploited on priority. Heating or cooling in buildings is an example of flexibility that is exploited, without compromising occupants comfort. In the case of electrical vehicles, the batteries combined with the understanding of car usage provide important flexibility for optimization. Finally, when flexibility embedded into the process in not sufficient to reach business objectives, energy storage can be added.

In terms of impact, AMBASSADOR has demonstrated:

• capacity to maximize self consumption of local renewable energy, while limiting peak consumption;
• capacity to define optimal charging schedule of electric vehicle fleet;
• at building level, achievable energy savings ranging from 10 to 40%;
• at district level, 20% of impact on cost thanks to smart algorithms.

AMBASSADOR has also made some recommendations that should contribute to boost Smart Districts deployment:

• price on CO₂, along with energy mix prediction ;
• support self consumption – energy positive districts ;
• support introduction of renewable energy sources and storage for more flexibility ;
• develop the concept of smart grid ready “thing”.

Finally, new business opportunities already emerge for AMBASSADOR industrial partners:

• Learning Grid by Grenoble
• EPFL campus Lausanne
• Zero carbon housing Developments (in Planning)

The complete press release is available for download here.

AMBASSADOR final conference took place at the testing site in Lavrion in October 2016. During the event the project was revealed to the public and the results were made well known to the audience. This was a very important action for the recognition of the project to the public and for giving the importance of project’s targets regarding the sustainable energy management in district community level through the contribution of buildings’ automation and algorithms implementation for managing the energy mix. The representatives from the whole project’s consortium were giving all the necessary information and gladly answering all the questions given from the public. Presentations from the final conference are available here.

The conference attracted a wide range of stakeholders from the whole value chain, such as representatives from the industrial sector and the public authorities, engineers from different field as well as students and private investors.

Additionally, national media, having high broadcasted rates, covered the final conference of the AMBASADOR project and make it well known to the national audience. On 12/10/15 Skai TV, one of the largest media groups in Greece broadcasted in national level during the breaking news a documentary presenting AMBASSADOR scope and the final conference results. On 15/10/16 broadcasted a more detailed documentary including a live interview with NTUA researcher.

A day after the final conference, the AMBASSADOR team also met with its Project Technical Advisor at its final review to conclude the work done during last 4 year.

The AMBASSADOR Innovation Day was organised in October 2016 and took place at CEA-INES demonstration site in Chambéry. As the public was French, it was decided to have all the presentations in French. Among the participants, there were representatives from SIG Genève, Tenerrdis, CSTB, Planair or Schneider Strategy

The topics for the Innovation Day were identified in line with the latest AMBASSADOR development and were divided into those that were more oriented towards the overall energy context and those that were closely reflecting the AMBASSADOR on-going work as well as potential business impact.

The topics and responsibles for preparation of the training materials were identified as follows:

• Overall energy context (SE)
• AMBASSADOR solutions (NBAT, CSEM)
• Smarts buildings efficiency & flexibility with DSO (SE)
• Flexibility & storage (LEC)
• District heating networks (TEK)
• Optimization & potentials (SE)
• Business opportunities (SE, LEC, ZF)

The presentations from the Innovation Day are available here.

The registration for AMBASSADOR final conference (12/10/2016 – Lavrion, Greece) and AMBASSADOR Innovation Day (18/10/2016 – Chambéry, France) have just been opened. For the final conference please click here, for the Innovation Day please continue here.

More information on the final conference are available on http://www.ambassador-fp7.eu/finalconference, on the Innovation Day on http://www.ambassador-fp7.eu/innovationday.

On the occassion of the M42 meeting, the AMBASSADOR team met in the middle of May 2016 in the EPFL campus in Lausanne, Switzerland.

During this two days meeting, AMBASSADOR progress in running activities was presented followed by workshops on the demo sites, exploitation and business models. During the meeting, the participants had also the opportunity to visit the EPFL campus, specifically Distributed Electrical Systems Laboratory (DESL) and its microgrid facility.

AMBASSADOR team actively participated to the 6th Workshop on the Impact of the Energy-efficient Buildings (EeB) PPP that was organised on 18 and 19 April 2016 in Brussels, Belgium. The objectives of the Workshop were to address innovation and exploitation issues in running EeB projects and explore potential for cross-project clustering.

This year AMBASSADOR contributed to a joint presentation part of Session2: ICT for design, monitoring and management of energy-efficient buildings and districts,  Area 4: Energy performance monitoring and management at district and city levels, where other 10 projects were included: Campus 21, SEEDS, AMBASSADOR, EEPOS, EPIC-HUB, IDEAS, RESILIENT, SmartKYE, CITYOPT, DIMMER, CossMic including the Umbrella projects EEBERS and Swiming.

All presentations from the workshop are available here.

On 12/10/2016 in Lavrion (Greece), the AMBASSADOR project will organise its final conference. The goal of the AMBASSADOR final conference is to present different outputs that have been developed within the scope of the project (technical session) and to demonstrate their impacts in real conditions on one of the AMBASSADOR test sites in Greek Lavrion (test site visit). On top of that, the work with AMBASSADOR District Energy Management and Information System (DEMIS) will be showcased (demo session). Different business aspects of smart districts, smart grids and smart cities will be discussed following the research, studies and interviews ran during the course of the project (business session). Last but not least the AMBASSADOR team would like to share with its audience as well as invited guests its lessons learnt from this challenging four years project (final discussion).

The SAVE THE DATE announcement is available here. More information including the conference agenda and registration will be continuously published on http://www.ambassador-fp7.eu/finalconference.

On 8/9/2016 in Chambéry (France) and on 11/10/2016 in Lavrion (Greece), the AMBASSADOR project will organise its summer schools for energy managers.

The topics to be presented will cover overall energy context, optimization strategies for buildings and districts dimension as well as the practical demonstration of the District Energy Management and Information System (DEMIS) developed within the framework of the project.

More information including detailed agenda and pre-registration will be available during May 2016 on http://www.ambassador-fp7.eu/summerschool.

The 5th edition of the EeB PPP Project Review 2016 has been recently published and AMBASSADOR project is among the presented projects.

In the framework of the EeB PPP, a joint initiative of the European Commission and the Energy Efficient Buildings (E2B) Committee of the ECTP, one of the commitments consists in monitoring the impacts and exploitable outcomes generated by the projects. This yearly publication presents the progress of 110 co-funded projects within the EeB PPP under the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) for 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 and 17 new co-funded projects under the Horizon 2020 programme for 2014.

This new edition highlights current results and achieved or potential impact of the EeB PPP projects. The projects demonstrate scientific and technological excellence, across all levels, from early stage conception to demonstration of almost ready-to-market innovations. Distributed into 7 technology-clusters defined according to the construction-related research and innovation value chain from the EeB PPP Roadmap (Design, Technology Building Blocks, Advanced materials and nanotechnology, Construction process, Energy performance monitoring & management, ICT and BIM), they illustrate the diverse innovation approaches and the importance of embracing all aspects of the building and construction sectors. You can download the Project Review 2016 here.

AMBASSADOR M36 review meeting took place at the beginning of December 2015 in Lavrion, Greece. The consortium presented intensive work of the last 18 months aiming to develop the solution and use cases defined during its first period. Several practical demonstrations were performed including the work with the District Simulation Platform as well as the District Energy Management and Information System developed within the scope of the project. The Lavrion test site visit concluded the demonstration of the latest AMBASSADOR work.

For the last one year of the project, the work will be especially oriented towards the work on three AMBASSADOR test sites (Lavrion, CEA-INES, BedZED) in order to deploy and validate the DEMIS and its effects on the energy / CO2 / costs efficiency. Several dissemination events will be organised including AMBASSADOR summer school and its final conference. More information will be regularly available on our website.