Smart Urban Isle

The ‘smart Urban Isle’ (SUI) project is a JPI Urban Europe project, with partners from Spain, Austria, Cyprus, Romania, Switzerland, Turkey and the Netherlands. A ‘smart Urban Isle’ is defined as ‘an area around a (public) building that locally balances the energy as much as possible, resulting in minimized import and export of energy from outside this area’. The project consisted of three complementary research blocks: (1) bioclimatic design, (2) management platform and (3) mini-networks. Bioclimatic design aimed at maximum comfort inside the buildings with minimum energetic cost. The management platform dealt with the automatic active measures that can be taken up in the SUI area. The SUI mini-networks block focussed on the development of local area energy concepts, investigating how to facilitate the generation, storage and supply of energy in the SUI.

The department of AE+T was mainly involved in block 1: bioclimatic design, and, as work package leader, in block 3: mini-networks. For several case studies, 2 of which were in the Netherlands, energy plans were developed, both at building level and at neighborhood scale.
For the development of a locally balanced energy system for each case study, a step by step approach was developed and applied, consisting of the following steps:

1. case study description
2. energy status quo
3. SUI concept potentials
4. SUI mini network development
5. evaluation

The application of the approach has shown that it  provides a clear structure, including some basic energy concepts, while at the same time leaving room for the development of new and innovative configurations based on the local energy demand and local energy potentials.

For the Dutch case studies, the approach led to an innovative local energy system concept with a high share of local renewable energy supply. As a result, two follow-up projects for further development have been granted in 2019 (nationally funded by RVO, www.rvo.nl) and are currently being carried out in cooperation with stakeholders from industry, end-users, housing corporations and local municipalities: LT ready (on affordable renovation measures that enable low-temperature heating) and deZONNET (on local feed-in heat grids bases on decentralized PVT (PV + thermal) panels).