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Research and Innovation | News | 18/02/2019

DRIMPAC GRANT

DRIMPAC GRANT

HYPERTECH Energy Labs have been awarded a new R&D contract from the European Commission (Project Acronym: DRIMPAC). The main outcome of DRIMPAC is to develop a comprehensive solution to empower consumers to become active participants in the energy market. DRIMPAC aims to bridge the gap of communication between grid/market and buildings by providing a unique and universal technological framework that facilitates the end-to-end communication of the necessary information for the discovery and delivery of demand flexibility.

Hypertech Energy Labs holds the role of the technical manager of the project and will coordinate the technical activities to be realized by an international consortium of renowned academic and industrial partners, led by the CERTH-ITI (Greece) and actively involving Siemens (Romania), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and SWT(Germany), Joint Research Centre – European Commission JRC and STAM (Italy), MyEnergia (Spain), SOREA (France), University of Cyprus (Cyprus) and E7 (Austria).

DRIMPAC is a project co-funded by the European Commission under the H2020 Programme/ Topic EE-12-2017 - Integration of Demand Response in Energy Management Systems while ensuring interoperability through Public Private Partnership (EeB PPP). The project has officially been launched on September 1st 2018, its duration is 36 months and it has a total budget of €4.6M.

Buildings constitute a vast, yet currently untapped, source of energy demand flexibility that can provide invaluable services to the energy system. This flexibility currently remains unattainable due to the lack of a technological framework that can connect the multitude of buildings and building systems with the energy system in a cost-effective manner as well as the reluctance of energy consumers to enroll in demand response programs.

DRIMPAC offers a comprehensive solution to empower consumer to become active participants in the energy markets. It comprises three main pillars:

a) A legacy and Standards-compliant interoperability framework to interconnect building energy loads/appliances and expose their demand flexibility as price-responsive demand to the grid or for market actors to aggregate and bid in ancillary service markets.

b) A human-centric, intelligent building energy management system that will lift the burden of demand response from the consumers shoulders and reduce reluctance and fear of participation in DR programs. It will infer user comfort preferences and dynamically control building loads to minimize energy cost and use for the building occupant leveraging dynamic prices, while always preserving comfortable and healthy indoor conditions.

c) Innovative business models and service offering for energy retailers in order to facilitate their transformation from commodity suppliers to digital energy service suppliers and kick-start the deployment of the DRIMPAC solution in the market.

The DRIMPAC technological framework and business models will be validated by four retailers supplying three energy carriers – electricity, natural gas and district heating – in four different national markets across the EU - France, Cyprus, Germany and Spain. Pilot demonstrations will take place in a range of building types, including residential, office, educational and others, in order to validate the DRIMPAC benefits across most building typologies.

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