HORIZON-EIC-2023-iCapitalPrize - The European Capital of Innovation Awards
EU Prizes: Application form (prizes) The European Capital of Innovation Awards: V1.0 – 08.03.2023
retrofitting of public housing stock and the introduction of an Electric Vehicle Fleet for Cork City Council Staff.
Retrofitting of Housing Stock
As part of the Climate Adaptation Strategy Cork City Council’s Housing Department is implementing several smart retrofitting projects across a portion of its 10,500 social houses. These projects aim to explore how retrofitting and the application of smart technologies can reduce carbon emissions, improve the quality of older homes, and reduce the incidence of fuel poverty. Over half of Cork City Council’s social houses were built before 1970, with some dating back to 1886. The retrofitting requirements to ensure these homes remain high-quality places to live for tenants and meet national energy efficiency goals are significant. Cork City Council is exploring combining deep energy retrofits and smart energy technologies to meet these targets. Implementation is ongoing to deliver on the current 25% target for Cork City’s public housing stock to achieve the near Zero Energy Building (nZEB) standard (as defined by national Building Regulations part L) by 2030. This would retrofit approximately 2750 units with all residual housing stock units to follow by 2050. Work is currently underway on installing 3,000 heat pumps in public housing by 2030. Cork City Council is currently involved in several national and international projects to trial and tests smart solutions in housing retrofitting including 3 projects that involve smart energy, measuring, monitoring, and reporting systems, smart energy storage, and renewables. The first project, funded by the Department of Housing, Southern Regional Assembly and Cork City Council has installed smart energy, measuring, monitoring, and reporting (EMMER) systems in 8 apartments located on the south side of the city. EMMR projects help the housing department to understand the impact of retrofitting activities across several parameters including energy efficiency and carbon reduction and can also help in designing predictive maintenance plans to keep the houses at their optimal efficiency. Identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure before and after retrofitting include both internal KPIs such as temperature, C02, heat pump usage, energy, and gas consumption and external KPIs such as external temperature, pressure, rainfall, and solar radiation, wind speed and direction. These KPIs are measured using a variety of tools including sensors, data loggers and digital remote monitoring and recording systems. This project aims to help validate the value and impact of deep retrofit schemes which are being rolled out and will also enable Cork City Council to accurately measure the carbon reduction of these works.
EU Project - MiniStor
Cork City Council’s Housing Department has engaged in many collaborative European -funded projects including MiniStor. MiniStor, a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme aims to design and produce a novel compact integrated thermal storage system to achieve sustainable heating, cooling and electricity storage and reduce the carbon footprint of the home. ‘MiniStor’ is an innovative system for the sustainable production and storage of heating, cooling, and electricity. It is solar-driven and utilizes a combination of thermochemical (TCM) and phase change materials (PCM) for thermal energy storage (TES). This configuration enables the achievement of considerably higher energy storage density compared to competitive TES systems, i.e., almost 10 times the energy density of water, which is usually used in heat storage systems. Also, a lithium-ion battery is used for storing electrical energy. As part of this project, Cork City Council will install an innovative home energy management system, lithium- ion battery and the ‘MiniStor’ innovative solar thermal system in a pre -1970s social house in the western part of the city. Throughout the demonstration phase, a series of performance KPIs will be measured including energy efficiency, storage capacity, environmental conditions, etc. The system will be monitored for at least two heating and two cooling seasons (winter and summer). Experience gained during the first year of operation will be used to gather feedback for fine-tuning the system. There is an expected 40% energy reduction predicted for this house following this project. The home energy management system allows users to get information about the performance of their house and enables the user to control the energy usage in the house.
EU Project - REDWoLF
Cork City Council is also a partner in The RED WoLF project (Rethink Electricity Distribution Without Load Following) funded by the EU programme Interreg North-West Europe. The three-year RED WoLF project will increase renewables usage and reduce carbon emissions for homes with photovoltaic solar
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