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The Clarity consortium, led by SENER, together with EURECAT and AGGITY, was one of the three chosen in the first phase of ProcuRE, an initiative funded by the European Union within the Horizon 2020 program. Clarity aims to integrate Artificial Intelligence solutions capable of converting buildings into sustainable infrastructure in a single platform.
SENER leads the Clarity consortium, one of the three winners of the first phase of the ProcuRE initiative. Comprising SENER, EURECAT and AGGITY, Clarity offers a single platform with artificial intelligence and digitalization solutions that can adapt a building or infrastructure to be sustainable, i.e. reduce CO2 emissions to a minimum, by achieving optimum efficiency and maximum self-consumption. Thanks to this solution, the European initiative ProcuRE – supported by public institutions from six cities – has selected Clarity as one of the three winning consortiums in the first phase of its proposal.
What is ProcuRE?
Within the framework of the European Union’s climate and energy policies, a group of cities and municipalities in Europe has launched the ProcuRE initiative, with the challenge of obtaining 100% renewable energy supplies (RES) in the existing public building stock through sustainability and innovation solutions.
The developer consortium includes entities such as the Savinjska, Šaleška and Koroška Regional Energy Agency (KSSENA), Slovenia, the Barcelona Metropolitan Area, in Spain; the institutions Stadt Nürnberg and Empirica in Germany; Energaia, the Energy Agency for the South of the Porto Metropolitan Area, Portugal; the Municipality of Eilat, in Israel; the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and Ozyegin University, Turkey; or Eurac Research in Italy. Between them, they manage more than 21,000 buildings.
ProcuRE is based on the following data: buildings are responsible for 40% of total energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions in the EU. Around 35% of buildings in the EU are over 50 years old and almost 75% of the building stock is energy inefficient. For 2050, it is expected that 90% of the existing building stock will remain in service. So refurbishment must be ramped up in Europe to achieve the EU’s climate goals, ensuring that existing buildings reach an optimum efficiency level and maximize self-consumption.
In this way, the ProcuRE developers have launched a tender, open to European suppliers, to design, develop and test innovative proposals, which allow a 100% renewable building to be created without the need to adopt invasive building measures. The initiative proposes carrying out pilot tests on buildings specific to the group of developers, to approve the proposed solution.
The ProcuRE initiative has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 963648.
SENER’s solution, within the Clarity consortium
Within the Clarity consortium (also including EURECAT and AGGITY), SENER has presented a single platform, based on artificial intelligence software (AI), capable of calculating and designing the optimal scenario to achieve a 100% renewable solution. The optimum installation calculation results in a mix of renewable technologies that should be installed in the building, combining variables such as the economic, regulatory, technical and environmental impact, as well as the impact of operational management, and thus determining the optimum size according to the building’s conditions.
The processes included in the platform are developed through five modules, which are building evaluation, the calculation of renewable installations based on artificial intelligence, preparation of a feasibility report, the design and construction of an as-built BIM model, which allows integration of all information related to the building into a single database, and improvements to building operation and maintenance using digital tools.
Some components or modules proposed by the Clarity consortium in its single platform are R&D products or solutions developed in different innovation projects of the three companies, which have been tested in real-world scenarios with great results. These include: systems to analyze the renewable generation potential of a building, such as the system to help decide on renewable energy sources (RES), the energy asset sizing tool (EAS) or the SENER Energy Management System (EMS), which allows predictive and automatic control of all the energy assets of an installation; operation and maintenance systems such as the RESPIRA® intelligent ventilation system, the SIGMA platform for digital asset management or the methodology registered in BIM blockchain.