Developing innovative energy concepts
The bar is set high – the amendment to the German Energy Saving Regulation (EnEV) back in 2013 aims at achieving a nearly carbon neutral building stock in Germany by the year 2050. It also brings higher requirements for evaluation methods as they no longer assume static energy balances, but now considers dynamic system behavior and user profiles. It is legislation like the Energy Saving Regulation or the German Renewable Energy Act (EEG), which will increase the proportion of renewable energy of the total power generation to 80 % by 2050, that are supposed to account for ecological and economic developments. Nuclear disasters in Fukushima and Chernobyl remind us that nuclear power can never be the Holy Grail for all energy related problems. It can – at best – be merely a bridging technology if anything. But as a matter of fact, fossil fuels, too, are causing ever more problems for global climate, which is slowly turning more and more into a an economic issue as well. So it is not surprising that there is a growing momentum in the attempt to find suitable alternatives for power generation. This paradigm shift, however, is mostly motivated by the fact that fossil fuels will have been depleted in a foreseeable future, while global energy demand is continuously growing, which leads to ever higher costs.
In order to counter the financial impact and to boost environmental protection, refurbishments and new buildings have to comply more and more with considerations of energy efficiency. This includes not only structural measures like insulation and the choice of suitable materials, but also technical equipment for power generation, storage and management with respect to fluctuating availability of renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar. As a consequence, there is a tendency towards more decentralized solutions with local, autonomous systems with intelligent integration into the power grid in contrast to traditional models with only one regional supplier. The development of such innovative energy concepts for buildings and entire areas is the specialty of EA Systems Dresden. They focus on designing integrated energy and storage systems as well as on managing automated processes through computer-aided control engineering. In order to live up to the requirements of this multiphysics approach, EA Systems Dresden draws upon modeling tools, such as SimulationX, for the design process. In collaboration with the Dresden University of Technology and ESI ITI, the Green Building library was developed for SimulationX to be able to create building specific models which was successfully used in the development of an autonomous house in Dresden and for the modernization of an entire area in the historic city center of Lohmen (Saxony, Germany).
