Modular Big Data Applications for Energy Services in Buildings and Districts: Digital Twins, Technical Building Management Systems and Energy Savings Calculations

Buildings should play a key role in the energy transition, since they account for almost 40% of EU’s energy consumption. This is acknowledged by numerous European directives, which set strict objectives towards promoting energy demand reduction in buildings, optimisation of the energy use or the application of renewable energy sources. On the other hand, the current digitalisation trend has as a consequence the appearance of vast amounts of static and real-time data both on energy and off-domain data (big data), as well as new procedures to exploit them (e.g. machine learning). All of this, makes it possible to apply smart analytics to the data and enhance the decision-making process of stakeholders towards pursuing a more efficient building stock. In this line, this chapter will present three applications (digital twins, technical building management and IPMVP protocol application) developed within the H2020 projects “Modular big data applications for holistic energy services in buildings”, I-NERGY “Artificial intelligence for next generation energy” and BD4NRG “Big Data for Next Generation Energy” to support the efficient management and decision-making process around buildings. Digital twins will be considered at three different scales (building, district and regional scales), and applied in pilots in Poland and Spain; whereas technical building management systems and IPMVP protocol application will focus on the building scale, and will be applied in Slovenia and Spain pilots, respectively.