Buildings - Seita

Buildings - The Sector Challenge

Buildings are currently at the forefront of the energy transition. They consume around a third of all energy. But more importantly, they are getting crucial updates: Solar panels, electric mobility needs of occupants, heat pumps replacing gas, batteries ― they’ll use more energy and definitely much more electricity than today.

Moving to future-ready energy-modern buildings is a huge task. More than 85% of all buildings need to be replaced or retrofitted to nearly zero-carbon by 2050. The three major goals we identify are to stay within grid capacity limits, to reduce energy costs, and to become greener. Many owners and operators of commercial buildings (like SMEs) are experiencing today that these goals are becoming critical in the near future.

How do we help?

There are many steps to be done to turn our buildings into energy-modern, grid-friendly prosumers: retro-fitting, construction, digitization etc.

At Seita, we work on one crucial building block, for which we are leading experts ― the orchestration of energy consumption (and even energy production) within a building, with our anticipating and smart energy planning software.

Who do we partner with?

We aim to work with digitization partners in this sector:

Monitoring companies
Facility management companies
Makers of Building Energy Management Systems, or BEMS

We currently work with partners on simulations of smart energy orchestration in commercial buildings (e.g. SME sites or utility buildings) and build integration-partnerships, where we provide computation of smart schedules in a Software-as-a-service fashion.

For domestic buildings (e.g. apartments), we are open to discussing opportunities, even though this segment seems not to be very active this year. It will be soon, however, and that is why we are engaged in several R&D cooperations around energy flexibility in domestic buildings, for instance with TNO – with them we work on implementing the new open S2 standard.

Use case

Heijmans is taking initiative in operating smart energy buildings. They begin with their modern office building, “Hive”. They’re about to install solar, (v2g) chargers, batteries and boilers. Choice of (expensive) equipment is one problem ― the question of how to operate, and which goals to consider, is another. Can the building be self-sufficient? Is there a positive business case?

Figure 1: Heijmans Hive building (credit: DOOR architecten)

The uncertainty: Sunshine, building usage and car charging are different every day. With flexibility in (car) batteries and smart operation, we can act ― but to what effect? First, can the building run on its own solar power? Second, if real-time market conditions like dynamic prices are used to optimize against, what happens to the building’s business case?

Figure 2: Visualization of simulation progress, good for deep dives

Heijmans asked Seita Energy Flexibility to explore this issue via simulations. From their main questions, we discussed 16 What-If scenarios. FlexMeasures enables us to bring our deep expertise into making these problems come alive ― we build data-driven stochastic models of the problem, and we apply turn-based simulation. This realistic approach yielded insightful outcomes and fruitful discussions.

Heijmans can now built data-driven cases for investment scenario’s for commercial buildings projects (where smart operation is a serious option).

Energy flexibility is complex. Let's partner up!

Let’s discuss how we can make the buildings sector greener in a scalable fashion.