When it comes to energy efficiency European guidelines set the bar higher year. Within a seven year timeframe, we will have to realise buildings that are nearly energy neutral or even produce energy to reach the targets for 2020.
I am staking all my cards on the development of smart grids. Grids within a building, between buildings and all the way to a super grid that covers whole multi-country regions. All buildings – homes, offices and industrial complexes – will need to be connected to this grid. Buildings will then be able to exchange heat and electricity and can make use of a wide array of sustainable power plants. These power sources could be wind and biomass close to home, hydropower from Sweden, solar energy from North Africa – you name it. We will soon be entering the era of the grid.
The challenge doesn’t lie in a lack of sustainable energy, but first in reducing the demand with highly energy efficient technics and second in dealing with variations in the supply. You need to have the capacity to store surplus energy for periods in which demand exceeds supply. In our energy lab we are working on methods to temporarily store energy. Right now our focus is on storage in buildings, but this is still on a small scale. We also work together with other labs like E.ON’s. We are looking for grid solutions, grid communication inside and between complex supply systems of buildings, able to store or produce energy as heat or electricity.
The future grid will need particularly large-scale storage capacity – amounting to something like Germany’s entire energy demand for several weeks . There are studies that focus on storing the energy in water reservoirs, in compressed air or in millions of car batteries, but the most promising method currently appears to be converting the temporary surplus of energy into methane, using a mixture of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Methane can simply be directed into the existing gas network, which offers the needed capacity, to be reused for heat, transport and the generation of electricity. When buildings subsequently communicate with one another via the smart grid, a new network of smart energy production and use will be complete.
The future smart grid is also a basis for our new innovative concept of the Smart Cities of tomorrow: total energy solutions for the urban environment whereby energy-neutrality becomes possible via a combination of energy-efficiency, smart grids and a mix of sustainable decentralised energy solutions. The first small-scale concept is developed for the municipality of Aalen.
