We end May with our 7th General Assembly!

The GEOFIT consortium successfully held its 7th Virtual General Assembly on May 20 and 21 2021, our first GA for 2021! The meeting was organised online in two intense half-day sessions during which work package leaders where able to present the progress made with the core technologies, demonstration activities and coordination work packages.

Kicking-off our 7th meeting!

The first-day session started with a focus on the state of the art of technical work packages (WP). Lead by our colleagues from IDS Georadar, Groenholland, AIT, and Nuig Galway, we got to review WP2 which focused on-ground research, worksite inspection, and improved drilling technologies, and wrapped up its work last April 2021. The presentations for WP 3, 4, and 5 presented the different advances made with our Shallow Ground Heat Exchangers, Heat Pumps, system integration and efficiency management. After a short coffee break, we had the presentation of the progress of pilot implementation. In this sense, we were celebrating the commissioning of our first pilot site in Perugia, an important milestone for the project! Our Bordeaux pilot has also taken important steps in the past months when it comes to drilling.

The GEOFIT Team

On the second day, we were able to review the advances made on our GeoBIM platform and the standardisation, exploitation, and communication activities and R2M started an open discussion on possible business cases, UNE presented different approaches to the standardisation language including the CWA and COMET updated on the most recent events and the new website design and materials.

The meeting wrapped up with high hopes that next time we might meet again in person and with a clear view of the next steps that will be taken by all partners during the next 6 months.

GEOFIT – Newsletter #2

This year has been intense!

One side of our activities has been led by the completion of the innovative geothermal systems designs that will be implemented at each demo site to demonstrate that our easy-to-install solution is capable of providing efficient heating and cooling. The other side of our activities has been pilot oriented, as we started the installation works in the demo site in Spain and have greatly advanced preparing the terrain for the installations at our demo site in Italy. In the meantime, our French and Irish demo sites are working hard to have everything ready to start the works in early 2021. Make sure to take a closer look at the highlights in our newsletter to learn more of these activities!

GEOFIT at Sustainable Places 2020

On Day 3 of the 4-day virtual Sustainable Places 2020 (SP2020) conference, Thursday 29th October from 14.00 – 17.00 CET, Marco Calderoni from GEOFIT contributed to the “Renewable Heating and Cooling Solutions for Buildings and Industry Workshop”, and the presentations and video recordings are publicly accessible.

Banner for “Renewable Heating and cooling solutions for Buidlings and Industry” at SP2020

The workshop brought together a selection of H2020 EU-funded projects involving experts from the biomass, geothermal, solar thermal and heat pump sectors to discuss a common strategy for increasing the use of renewable energy technologies for heating and cooling for buildings and industry. Renewable energy technologies for heating and cooling are safe, clean, efficient and increasingly cost-competitive. The workshop comprised four thematic sessions, namely “RHC for industrial applications”, “Storage solutions for RHC support in buildings”, “Innovative solutions for RHC deployment in buildings”, and finally the one that GEOFIT presented in called “Demonstration actions for RHC in buildings”.

Marco Calderoni from R2M Solution presented the GEOFIT project and highlighted first lessons learnt based on experience at the five demonstration sites.

R2M Solution organizes the annual international Sustainable Places conference, and the recent 8th as usual focused on the built environment at building, district, and urban scales to include our transport and energy infrastructures. Renowned for showcasing results coming out of the EU Horizon 2020 Framework Programme via the participation of cutting-edge research and innovation projects, the scope of Sustainable Places is captured directly in its name. It involves designing, building and retrofitting the places we live and work in a more sustainable way.

A GEOFIT poster was also displayed in the virtual room of Sustainable Places 2020.

Participating projects wereSWS-Heating – HYBUILD – CREATE – TRI-HP – HYCOOL – SHIP2FAIR – SUNHORIZON – Heat4Cool – GEOFIT – SCORES – Innova microSolar – Hybrid BioVGE – RES4BUILD – SolBioRev – FRIENDSHIP

Chair of the workshop: Andrea Frazzica (CNR ITAE) – partner of GEOFIT

IBPSA UK Conference paper (2020)

Conference paper presented in IBPSA-England Building Simulation and Optimisation Conference 2020

Available for download in NUIG repository and Zenodo.

Title: A novel ROM methodology to support the estimation of the energy savings under the Measurement and Verification protocol.

Language: English

Authors: Alessandro Piccinini (*1,2,3), Magdalena Hajdukiewicz (*1,2,3), Letizia D’Angelo (*1,2,3), Luis Miguel
Blanes (*1,2,3), Marcus M. Keane (*1,2,3)

*1: School of Engineering, College of Science and Engineering, National University of Ireland
Galway, Ireland
*2: Informatics Research Unit for Sustainable Engineering (IRUSE) Galway, Ireland
*3: Ryan Institute, National University of Ireland Galway, Ireland

Abstract: This paper presents a novel Reduced Order grey box Model (ROM) methodology, based on a Resistor-Capacitor (RC) network, which supports the creation of the baseline energy consumption and the estimation of energy savings due to Energy Conservation Measures (ECMs) under the Measurement and Verification protocol. Within this scope, a description of the RC network, including a calculation of the parameters’ needed to execute the ROM, are presented. This ROM methodology is demonstrated on an educational building located in Sant Cugat, Spain as part of the H2020 GEOFIT project. The results presented in this paper demonstrate that the ROM is sufficiently accurate for the creation of the baseline energy consumption and for estimating the energy savings of different ECMs.

Raw data is available for download here.