Enginency
Toolset to improve building's energy efficiency
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Background 

 

This section offers your background information about the state-of-the-art that forms the starting point for the research within ENGINENCY. At the same time, it describes the knowledge context of the ENGINENCY playing field. The contents will be extended during the course of the project.


 

Market environment and business opportunity
Three main drivers are pushing the energy efficiency market growth in buildings: price of electricity, regulations and societal challenges related to decrease in greenhouse emissions. The necessity of reducing energy consumption by consumers is strongly supported by the prices of electricity, which are having a high impact in the recent years. For instance, in 2014 gas and electricity prices for the tertiary sector consumers increased by 1.9% and 2.7% respectively with respect to the previous year, while inflation rate was -0.1% by December 2014 in Europe. On the other side, Europe is witnessing the implementation of stringent regulations, framed in the 2010 Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and the 2012 Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) foreseeing. This regulatory framework is fostering the market growth around energy efficiency in buildings. Consequently, the global market for building energy efficient products and services is forecasted to grow from 222.4 billion € in2014 to 461.5 billion € in 2023 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.4%. Within Europe, the electricity consumption in the residential and commercial building sector doubled between 1980 and 2000, and is expected to increase by another 50% within 2025. Therefore, as estimated by the International Energy Agency (IEA), energy efficiency in buildings will stimulate about half of energy supply investments by 2030, with a cumulative spending forecast in Europe of 622.8 billion € from 2014 to 2023, including products and services.

 

In this context, many solutions came out addressing building energy efficiency. These existing solutions generally have shortcomings in terms of:

 

    • Limited scope: Only address single buildings or building portions, while not scaling to districts/groups of interacting buildings. Moreover, current solutions tend to only target a single segment of buildings among new, “smart” (i.e., with a Building Management System - BMS), and “dumb” (older buildings without a BMS).
    • Limited technology: Current market solutions are not offering forecasts on the building energy expenditure, considering possible refurbishment work, nor are capable of real-time responses, leveraging on limited intelligence and learning capabilities, and on static models and data.
    • No reduction of process costs: Current building energy-efficiency processes are managed by Energy Services Companies (ESCOs) and Energy Efficiency Consultants (EECs), which do not own all the needed expertise and are forced to delegate specific audits and analysis to various unconnected companies, each one specialized in a single energy efficiency approach, resulting in a piecemeal approach, with consequent lower process efficiency and higher prices.

 

The Enginency approach
In this context, Enginency is a ground breaking solution optimising and implementing energy efficiency in buildings, offering:

 

    • Wide scope: Enginency is capable of managing both isolated buildings and small groups of interacting buildings, while supporting management of both new facilities and retrofitting of existing ones.
    • Innovative approach and technology: Enginency leverages on a unique holistic approach and on innovative inspection and monitoring technologies to drastically reduce the energy expenditure (above 50%), and the associated energy footprint. Enginency pursues energy efficiency through ALL the four available energy-efficiency approaches (i.e., Inspection, Monitoring, Data processing and simulation, and Management).
    • Market differentiation: Enginency will differentiate its market, being offered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) to ESCO/EECs, enabling valuable improvement of productivity in delivering their services, and directly commercialised to end-users, leveraging on the existing consortium experience and market channels. Direct commercialization to end-users is made possible by the Expert System support and by the unique self-calibration algorithm, which open the usage of the service to end-users which cannot afford contracting a physical expert. Enginency will be offered to end-users with an attractive zero-risk formula, not including initial costs, and allowing a return of eventual refurbishment investments in less than two years.

 

Ambition, the Enginency uniqueness
Enginency presents a holistic solution for energy efficiency in buildings, which brings support in the energy experts’ daily activity, increasing their current capabilities in a single automatic solution to optimize and decrease the use of energy (above 50% reduction of energy consumption). In addition, Enginency can be easily integrated with BMS and Facilities Management Systems through the share of information, thanks to shared APIs, providing a unique set of knowledge about the energy behaviour of the managed building.

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