UBITECH ENERGY participates at the kick-off meeting hosted by CERTH (November 9 & 10, 2023) in Thessaloniki, Greece of the EVELIXIA Innovation Action, officially started on November 1st, 2023. The project is funded by the European Commission (Grant Agreement No. 101123238) and spans on the period October 2023 – September 2027. The EVELIXIA project envisions to realize Buildings as Active Utility Nodes (BAUNs), rendering the EU Building stock as: a) energy efficient; b) connected, by facilitating a two-way communication between the grid and the occupants, capitalizing on flexible technologies; c) smart, by utilizing analytics supported by sensors and controls to co-optimize efficiency, flexibility, and occupant preferences; and d) flexible, reducing, shifting, or modulating energy use according to occupant needs, while considering utility signals.
EVELIXIA structures the advancement of its solutions along five Innovation Pathways: IP1: Building to-Grid Services (B2G); IP2: Grid to Building Services (G2B); IP3: Interactivity and interfaces between people and buildings; IP4: System Interoperability; and IP5: Innovative HW as flexibility enablers, which will be integrated, implemented and validated in 7 large-scale real pilots (GR, RO, FR, FI, ES, AT, DK). During the deployment and validation of the EVELIXIA platform, different actors (i.e. DSO, DNO, ESCO, aggregators) from various sectors (electricity, heating/cooling, mobility) will exchange data to provide B2G and G2B services and will participate in the development of Business Models showing the economic viability of the proposed solutions.
EVELIXIA puts a strong focus on social engagement, empowering citizens not only as adopters of solutions, but also as co-creators applying methodologies for citizen and consumer engagement and advanced interfaces of interaction between people and buildings. The main expected results include: 14 scalable B2G/G2B services demonstrated, including DSF (implicit, explicit, switching, etc.), P2P energy trading, energy asset management (daily/intraday), TSO/DSO/DHO and system planning services. The project has been implemented in the following areas: reduction of GHG emissions by 17%, increase of flexibility by up to 25%, increase of self-consumption by up to 100%, reduction of energy consumption by 13.5% and increase of renewable energy generation by 11%.
Within EVELIXIA, UBITECH ENERGY will implement the Autonomous District Decision Support Toolbox targeting grid stakeholders (energy aggregators, retailers, agencies and grid operators), providing services from the Grid to the Building that could mutually benefit both sides. Such decision mechanisms will employ model-assisted schemes for grid/district planning, management, and control: episodic reinforcement learning using DDPG, optimized fuel assets management using XGBoost, batched assets management through reward matrices and Q-learning. Moreover, UBITECH ENERGY will work towards the delivery of the Network Awareness and Forecasting Toolbox contributing with the development of a multi-vector smart grid maintenance service that will assess the health/degradation levels of multi-grid related assets (e.g. BESS, MV/LV substations, PVs, HPs, power lines) using aging assessment models, when connected to energy networks, based on black-box data driven models.
