BUILDING

Development of a methodology for continuously measuring the energy performance of low-energy buildings

Partnership

This project is supported and financed by the ANR as part of the HABISOL call for projects: HABitat Intelligent et SOLaire photovoltaïque.

Coordinator: Olivier Flechon, CEA-INES

Azimut Monitoring, now part of the Hager Group

INES - National Solar Energy Institute

LIST - Systems and Technology Integration Laboratory

LISTIC - Computer Science, Systems, Information and Knowledge Processing Laboratory

LOCIE - Design Optimization and Environmental Engineering Laboratory

Context: the environmental challenge

The leading energy-consuming sector in France is residential and tertiary (46.5% of total national consumption), ahead of transport and industry. It also accounts for 25% of national carbon dioxide emissions, making it a major contributor to the greenhouse effect.

Under the Kyoto agreements, France is committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by a factor of 4 by 2050. To help meet this target, France intends to accelerate the development of energy-efficient buildings, with the BBC (Bâtiment Basse Consommation) label being applied to buildings by 2012, and globally positive buildings incorporating renewable energy production by 2020.

The building sector is the focus of particular attention at a time when safeguarding our environment is a universal concern. This sector can be seen as the main and most accessible source of energy efficiency. That's why so many hopes are pinned on the rapid and effective implementation of solutions to improve the energy performance of buildings.

French and international research, aware of the stakes involved, has for some years been making a major effort to develop projects, both in the field of technological evolution and in that of evaluation and simulation tools, aimed at innovating in the field of energy efficiency and the integration of renewable energies. In the context of the construction of new buildings with very low energy consumption, or even energy autonomy, it is becoming imperative to put in place a systematic practice of monitoring the newly constructed building to check that its actual performance is in line with the objectives set in the project and with the prescriptions made at the design stage. Indeed, the client will want to know why he paid more for the building, and check that what was predicted corresponds to reality.

In the event of observed performance not meeting objectives, we need to be able to diagnose the building in order to identify and prioritize the causes of the malfunction. Finally, monitoring the building throughout its life would enable us to detect any operating drift and ensure more effective management of its energy behavior. It is even possible to envisage the building's own autonomy, by equipping it with a form of intelligence through observation and description (self-diagnosis).

Objectives

The main aim of this project is to develop a methodology for continuously measuring the performance of future BBC or BEPOS buildings. Ultimately, this methodology should make it possible to develop an ambitious "Energy Result Guarantee" concept based on the same principle as the "Solar Result Guarantee" (GRS) developed for Individual Solar Water Heating (CESI). The GRS will enable project owners to know what they are committing to when designing a building. It will also enable corrections to be made during the life of the building, and problems to be diagnosed.

The implementation of measurement resources is also particularly important and ambitious. Each of the platform's experimental buildings will be equipped with several hundred sensors, whose metrology and results management will have to be ensured.

LISTIC will contribute its expertise in the development of data management and data fusion methods to the study and design of the software and hardware architecture that will support the operational levels. In particular, this architecture will provide the services needed to abstract the functions offered by the tools and sensors positioned in the buildings, and then process and present the information in near-real time.

As part of the project, we will be placing particular emphasis, on the one hand, on infrastructure scalability and system agility in relation to the changes required by energy consumption models and user practices, and on the other hand, on tools to promote technological evolution and interoperability, using approaches developed within distributed information fusion systems.