Northern Europe demo site 1 – Eindhoven and Helmond (Netherlands)
One part of the Northern Europe Demonstration takes place in the Netherlands, in the cities of Eindhoven and Helmond.
In Helmond, three houses of social housing corporation Compaen are currently being renovated and equipped with solar panels on the roof, heat-harvesting façade elements and a heat pump. At the other three northern demo locations in Eindhoven owned by social housing corporation Trudo, an “energy-garden-shed” is built, next to solar panels that are added to the roof of the house. The energy-sheds are built with heat-harvesting roof- and façade elements and equipped with a heat pump.
For both Dutch demo sites, the concept is similar: solar panels generate electricity that is used to operate the heat pump, which harvests heat from the innovative façade on the house and the shed, respectively. The harvested energy is used to efficiently heat the house, which is equipped with a suitable ventilation system and insulated well to avoid unnecessary heat losses. The goal of the Dutch demo is to demonstrate that the combination of solar panels, heat pump and click-on heat-harvesting façade elements can result in aesthetically pleasing energy-neutral or energy-positive buildings, and to move away from natural gas as a heat source. The energy performance and the climate within the houses will be monitored after completion.
Northern Europe Demo site 2 – Austria
The intervention aimed to the renovation of the front façade of the NSG – Pilkington downstream production plant, located in Austria. The area of the whole façade amounts to 66,5 m2, consisting of 30,4m2 vision parts and 36,1m2 spandrel parts.
The former windows, made of two glass panes combined to an insulating glass unit, were installed in 1992 and were provided with rather poor thermal insulation properties (U=1,5 W/m2K), compared with current standards.
The existing windowshave been replaced with Pilkington SunplusTM BIPV Vision which, as a look-through solution, is only partly covered with solar cell stripes and ensures a good visible connection to the outside world. For the spandrel parts, Pilkington SunplusTM BIPV Spandrel was used, which is completely covered by the solar cell stripe technology.
The new facade not only ensure optimum thermal performances ( Ug= 0,65W/m2K) but it also enables electricity production.
Check this video to see the fully operating facade!
Southern Europe demo site – Savona Campus
The Southern Europe Demosite (SED) is located at the Savona University Campus (one of the venues of the University of Genoa) where a Smart Polygeneration Microgrid (SPM) is already installed to provide electric and thermal energy with a district heating network (DHN) to the Campus buildings. The SED will integrate the ENVISION harvesting panels with a 100kW mGT and an innovative high-efficiency heat pump with the aim of testing the performance of the ENVISION harvesting solutions and their integration with other devices in a sort of microgrid. The system will be also equipped with an advanced MPC (Model Predictive Control) to define the best control and management strategy optimising the renewable energy exploitation and minimizing the consumption of fossil fuels and the CO2emissions.
The SED will be also interconnected with the existing DHN of the Savona Campus in order to test its operation also in a real environment.
Moreover, the ENVISION Ventilated Window has already been installed into an office inside Delfino building; the indoor conditions of the “ventilated window office” and of a “twin office” will be monitored by a system supplied by RINA that is able to evaluate the quality of the environment inside the room, to compare the situation with and without the Ventilated Window.