Digital twins to improve building sustainability
Helping commercial and industrial buildings owners to make better energy transition plans is in the sights of the partnership between Scotland-based IES and Eaton.
The two companies plan to use digital twins – 3D digital representations of assets that can be interrogated – to explore options for making buildings more sustainable including various combinations of EV charging infrastructure, energy storage and renewable generation technologies to identify the most effective energy ecosystems.
IES integrates physics-based simulation with the 3D model, real-time operational data, machine learning and AI to provide insights, which will be allied to Eaton’s expertise in power management to devise strategies for building decarbonisation, energy efficiency improvements and energy cost reductions.
Delphine Clement, commercial and industrial buildings segment leader at Eaton in EMEA, says that it will be possible to show customers how their buildings will perform before and during their energy transition journey.
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“They will be able to examine the costs and benefits of various options to boost sustainability to help them better understand and de-risk the investments they need to make.”
Don McLean, founder and CEO of IES, says that digital twins will be key to the work because they respond and behave like their real-world counterparts, translating data into essential decision support information.
“We will examine how a building is used, with a focus on both energy efficiency and user comfort, before constructing a digital twin to forecast the potential energy savings and payback periods of various applications of Eaton’s ‘Buildings as a Grid’ approach.”
Eaton’s Buildings as a Grid is aimed to transform buildings into ‘energy hubs’ combining renewable energy generation, storage and intelligent control to deliver flexibility to the grid and value to owners.
IES has previously developed building digital twins as part of the Horizon 2020 supported SunHorizon project coupling heat pump systems with solar thermal technologies and storage to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels and lower emissions in residential and commercial buildings in the different climatic regions of Europe.
The company also is coordinating the Horizon 2020 supported iBecome project to lower the energy costs of buildings while at the same time enhancing both the wellbeing and comfort of occupants through the provision of both energy and non-energy services.
