Smart living – Energy efficiency

Practical example and current challenges

• Today, around 35 percent of final energy is consumed in our homes. In contrast, Energy consumption comes from all sectors, such as electricity, heating, gas, buildings, and, in the future, also electric mobility.
• As part of the energy efficiency strategy for buildings, Germany's building stock is to be made virtually climate-neutral by 2050. Meeting this goal will only be possible by using smart solutions that increase energy efficiency and cloud-based coupling between the electricity, heat, electric mobility, and buildings sectors.
• This will involve data-based solutions to network the relevant energy consumers, producers, and storage systems across different buildings. In addition to the devices that are already widely connected today – such as heating and cooling installations and all types of IoT and household appliances – an important role will also be played by power-to-heat (PtH), power-to-gas (PtG), power-to-mobility (PtM) as well as electricity and heat storage devices.
• In order to balance generation, storage, and consumption, various processes need to be established around the building, from power management at the grid connection (smart meter gateways), to smart energy management, through to energy trading across all buildings. Smart solutions are required that enable the systems to be designed around the individual needs of the residents.

What added value does the "GAIA-X project" offer?

• If we want to realize the macroeconomic and overarching energy efficiency goals for individual buildings, neighbourhood solutions, and smart cities, we need to create overarching, interoperable networks that cross local boundaries.
• Only a cloud system with governance rules that provide clear guidelines for data protection will be able to manage the balancing act between data protection, individual user habits, and energy supply security in the long term. If such a solution were available, it would also be relevant for our secure critical energy infrastructure, which is under special regulatory protection. Here, clear distributed approaches under national co-regulation can guarantee availability. GAIA-X offers the opportunity to provide such a cloud infrastructure.
• Protected access for all actors (residents, owners, energy service providers, and contractors) to the usage data needed for energy forecasting, e.g., energy consumption and behaviour-specific information such as arrival and departure times and any absences.
• GAIA-X enables a uniform and holistic pool of information to be established on all relevant devices installed in a building. This is vital in order to develop scalable, cross-cutting energy products.
• An overarching identity and access management (IAM) system provide secure access (confidential chain of action) to the devices from private and semi-public areas, provided that the customer or the owner has provided their consent. This access system can either be used to benefit the grid (clear guidelines, timetables) or consist of tariff-based incentive schemes. After that, the focus will be on the mass market.
• By pairing the iMSys infrastructure with the GAIA-X cloud infrastructure, further energy efficiency gains can be made.

Use Case Team

• Anke Morlath – Aareon
• Kerstin Hausmann – Aareon
• Prof. Ingo Kunold – IKT-Dortmund
• Birgid Eberhardt – GSW Sigmaringen
• Peter Kellendonk – KEO
• Thomas Fischedick – KEO
• Dr. Markus Bell – PPC AG
• Marilen Ronczka – PPC AG
• Thomas Feld – Strategion
• Henrik Kortum – Strategion
• Marco Sauer – ZVEI