Building energy use accounts roughly for 40% of primary energy consumption in the EU and USA. Over the past decade, building energy consumption has increased due to population growth, urbanisation, more time spent indoors, increased demand for various building functions (read: mechanical heating and air-conditioning), indoor environmental quality, and last but not least, climate change. If nothing is done, greenhouse gas emissions from buildings will more than double in the next 20 years.
Climate change puts also pressure to decarbonise our surrounding energy system. Increasing the share of renewable energy sources increases volatility in the electricity grid. To balance the electricity system, transmission system operators maintain market places in which players can provide different flexibility resources.
We at Kapacity.io vision that buildings have an immense untapped potential to contribute to their surrounding energy system. In the Nordics, we tend to heat our buildings 24/7, disregarding occupancy patterns and actual comfort (I’ll go more into detail on indoor environmental comfort in a later post). These cause in addition to huge inefficiencies also an inelastic consumption pattern, which could be easily enhanced with automation.
Unsurprisingly, the building automation world is full of different control strategies. We take advantage of the already existing methods and protocols in order to take the next step in building controls: creating comfortable environments for occupants while controlling buildings to decrease energy consumption and provide capacity to balance the electricity grid.
Are you interested in what we are doing? We will soon launch our web-tool for quantifying an individual building’s flexibility potential. Follow us and be among the first ones to try it out!
Cheers,
Sonja
COO & Co-founder