The integrated Heat4Cool solution will provide, as a whole, at least 30% of energy consumption reduction in the retrofitting of residential buildings. The targeted source of energy consumptions are:
Space Heating, Cooling and Domestic hot water
The two main heating and cooling solutions will be:
- A solar assisted Adsorption Heat Pump, which will be easily integrated to the existing natural gas building installation
- An advanced DC Heat Pump driven by PV array and coupled with a modular advanced PCM heat and cold storage
Furthermore, we will aim to improve the Heating and Cooling technologies’ performance by exploiting the daily residual energy losses. For this purpose, a high-performance heat exchanger utilising sewage water will be developed in the project to connect this low temperature heat stream to Heat4Cool solutions.
Renewable energy
The Solar thermal and PV system are important components of the retrofitting solution due to the active energy production and their highly integration ability to Heat4Cool heating and cooling solutions (AdHP and DC Heat Pump). The integration of RES to the building is expected to reduce the heating and cooling consumption in winter and summer, respectively, and it is another step toward the net-zero energy standards by increasing the self-consumption rate.
Smart Control
As the brain of the energy management system, the smart control will not only manage the facilities of the building, but also produce the optimal control strategy for the user, user will be able to remotely/locally control the building (automatically or manually with recommendation). The smart control system will take the user behaviour and consumption profile, weather, building characteristics, HVAC equipment, grid status and energy prices, and other monitored data into the integrated computing model to directly control or recommend the user with the optimal heating/cooling system operation (e.g. when should the DHW can harvest the maximum benefit, or should the appliance shift to another time slot etc.
Scale up to district/buildings
The AdHP and DC Heat Pump coupled with Sunamp heat storage system assisted by RES are proper solutions for individual building, while the sewage system and smart control system enables the wider implementation and aggregate the benefits from larger scale application. The integration of various district-wide systems and demand flexibility will enable the optimal coordination of the smart grid through appropriate demand response strategies, defined with the use of a Visual Analytics Module for demand analysis, aggregation/ clustering and classification. Overall, the project will enable optimised peak-load management at the grid level, through the integration of flexible energy systems, RES availability and demand flexibility for load shedding and/or shifting.