Increasing the adoption of Digital Twin solutions within the built environment for achieving net zero

Lead Participant: SMARTSENSOR LABS LIMITED

Abstract

The Copper Alliance Institute claims that BACS has the potential of saving 15-22% of the total energy consumption in European buildings. It is highly cost-effective, with benefits being nine times higher than costs. Even more significant are the contributions toward climate change mitigation. A reduction of 260 to 419 million tons of CO2 would reduce Europe's emissions from fuel combustion by 8-13% by 2035\.

UKGBC's Whole Life Carbon Roadmap illustrates that the UK Built Environment is currently responsible for 25% of total UK greenhouse gas emissions. If surface transport is included within the scope of the built environment, the total share of UK emissions increases to 42%.

Newly constructed buildings are more energy efficient, but 80% of buildings in 2050 have already been built, so a major priority is decarbonising our existing stock. Hence, we focused our solution to increase the energy efficiency in existing commercial buildings.

This project will accelerate the adoption of AI solutions within the built environment. AI for Smart Buildings can make installed BACS systems and equipment more energy efficient. AI is trained to learn energy requirements such as electricity, temperature from past data and behaviour. Depending on past experiences, AI can predict the optimum use of power when required and 'what if' scenarios can be understood.

Despite the benefits, the owners of small commercial buildings simply don't have the time, resources or capital to implement cutting-edge technologies. This is because the cost and technical requirement for the initial installation are high for small-size projects.

We will integrate our Digital Twin AI platform into any traditional BACS system with connectors to make the building more efficient and smarter. Advantages of this solution are that it already integrates with many BACS systems and AutoML is implemented to create the Digital Twin, reducing the technical skills, thus allowing for a wider range of deployments.

With our digital twin integrated platform, decarbonization initiatives can be developed and refined, evaluate several options, simulate the outcomes and track progress in real-time to ensure your energy efficiency targets are on track.

Lead Participant

Project Cost

Grant Offer

SMARTSENSOR LABS LIMITED £48,964 £ 48,964

Publications

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