Better monitoring for energy efficiency in buildings
Phys.org, February 23, 2015
The past five years have seen energy efficiency in buildings moving from a welcomed addition to a sector priority. Unfortunately, well-defined targets do not always translate in effective measures: gaps between projected and actual performance can be huge, resulting in poor return on investment. The PERFORMER project is aiming to solve this problem with a holistic energy monitoring methodology.
The clock is ticking. If the EU is to reach its objective of increasing the energy efficiency of European buildings by 20 % before 2020, significant efforts still have to be made to promote the adoption of new generation components and products, improve modelling approaches and monitoring, agree on common European standards and reduce the performance gap.
Launched in 2013, the PERFORMER consortium is hoping to help the EU rise to these challenges, particularly by providing stakeholders with new tools and methodologies. These include an ‘Energy Instrumentation Kit in a box’ to monitor energy performance, an Energy Simulation Environment and a cloud-based data storage and simulation facility which makes benchmarking easier compared to local solutions.