Specific Challenge:

Renewable, local energy sources have a great potential to drastically reduce the use of primary energy for both heating and cooling in residential and commercial buildings. In order to stimulate the uptake of solutions that harness these sources, it is necessary to make existing technologies more performant and therefore more cost-efficient and attractive for the market. In addition, innovation in resource mapping, monitoring and control tools have the potential to improve the design and the operation of heating and cooling systems thus reducing investments and operation costs and increasing the systems' performance. This specific challenge is in line with the objectives of the SET-Plan, of Innovation Challenge n. 7 ("Affordable Heating and Cooling of Buildings") of Mission Innovation and the roadmap of the Energy-efficient Buildings (EeB) cPPP.

Scope:

The proposal is expected to address one or more of the following aspects:

• Optimisation of the different components of a renewable heating and cooling system;
• Development of tools and systems to optimize the design and monitoring of the different components of a heating and cooling system;
• Development of integrated control systems for the smart operation of a heating and cooling system.

The proposed systems will harness renewable local energy sources to supply heating and cooling in residential and small and larger commercial buildings as they have different heat/cold needs. The definition of residential building includes single houses and apartment blocks.

Attention should be paid to reducing emissions of air pollutants.

Expected Impact:

The project is expected to lead to either a significant performance increase, in the order of 10-20%, in terms of available heat/cold or to a reduction in the investment and operation costs or to a combination of both aspects, reducing the dependence on fossil energy for heat and cooling in buildings.