The European energy sector is undergoing a fundamental change with the increasing digitalisation of energy assets and the wide penetration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), such as renewable energy sources (RES), smart home devices (IoT) and smart meters.
The increasing growth of DERs is continuously expanding the energy system “edge”, in terms of controllability, while increasing its operational complexity, since the amount of data is growing exponentially and “understanding” of the knowledge encapsulated in these big data will be critical for meeting operational requirements for high efficiency, resilience and decarbonization. The edge of the energy system is dominated by buildings that shall no longer be merely perceived as depreciating assets, but as active nodes of the system that are associated with the generation of vast amounts of data. Such large datasets provide significant opportunities for better and more efficient performance monitoring and optimization of smart buildings through Advanced Big Energy Data Analytics. However, the high upfront costs and the sheer complexity of building data keep slowing the pace of relevant investments and retain reluctancy of building value chain stakeholders in making the transition towards datadriven and intelligent operations.
Under this perspective, the H2020-BEYOND project brings forward a novel and affordable bundle of big data and AI technologies that aspire to trustfully take data management and analytics away from the hands of building stakeholders, offer to them easily digestible intelligence extracted from diverse building data and enable the realization of datadriven optimization functions that can pave a ROI-positive path through better informed decisions and new business opportunities arising from the integration of the building sector in energy markets.
At the same time BEYOND addresses business and optimization needs of the variety of stakeholders involved in the energy system value chain and are dependent on data generated by the building sector, by increasing their data reach and allowing them to access and analyse myriads of building-related data for intelligently optimizing their business and operational processes, through the utilization of innovative data sharing models.
Apparently, BEYOND promotes the cultivation of a trusted and rigorous ecosystem of stakeholders related to the building the sector, enabling them to navigate the convergence of their physical and digital worlds, further advance their operations and find new revenue streams, by blending internal intelligence with external information pieces which would, otherwise, not be accessible.
The business value of the BEYOND technological offering is currently validated and verified, through the release of a series of data intelligence-driven applications that effectively address the needs of the various stakeholders involved in the BEYOND-enabled ecosystem for (i) improvement of buildings' energy performance and energy cost reduction, (ii) increase of self-consumption, (iii) creation of new revenue streams from involvement in energy markets, (iv) bankable investments in buildingrelevant energy infrastructure and (v) evidence-based network and urban planning, while allowing them to explore new business opportunities for enhancing their role and involvement in the digital energy transition.
