Solingen

Services – Cost-Benefit – Exploitation – Partners

The pilot site Pommernweg consists of 354 dwellings in 31 buildings. The core part of the service is a central motor valve, once closed, interrupting heat supply to a dwelling. This motor valve is connected to a controller which closes the motor valve automatically as soon the desired indoor temperature is reached.

The awareness system is based on the information collected allowing tenants to check their consumption and set their preferences while the back-office enables efficient processes in the social housing company.

Services

edss

The tenant is able to see whether his pre-payments will cover the costs of his consumption for the actual year. If the consumption of a dwelling is high compared to the mean, an email is automatically generated and sent to the tenant or to the technical staff responsible for the housing. The tenant receives detailed information how he can reduce energy costs. The tenant is able to change the heating times in the web portal, also times of vacations can be implemented. Every month, a report is created and sent per email to the tenant.

Todo

feature list to follow

ems

In case of very high energy consumption and very high room temperatures alerts are created.

Cost-Benefit

The business case for Solingen foresees a switch to renewable fuels and local heat production managed by the stakeholders. While the investments for the production site where not part of esesh and therefore not modelled in the analysis the entire management and awareness services surrounding it ensure energy savings and optimised operation of the power plant. While SBV needed to invest in a heat production site, remaining risks are covered by the newcomer envi. Note: The analysis below does not include the large investment costs for the boiler(s) running on renewable fuels and their maintenance. However, the case will remain positive as long as the fuel costs will not increase above the costs of gas which would imply a threefold increase.

Exploitation

The ems and edss services for the tenant are integral parts of IT solution for managing complex heating and energy grids. The tenant portal visualized a part of data which is collected and assessed to optimize a heating grid and which is needed for invoicing. For the last purpose we only need yearly data and a remote read out is not usual because the cost are higher than the reduction of the costs for meter reading. Another point is the so called integrated invoicing which is a raising efficiency of the administration within the social housing company. Particularly if this is combined with reachable benefits due to optimization of the heating gird there is a short return of costs. The reduction of heating costs due to energy saving is reachable due to two facts: First: Due to activities of the tenants, motivated by the edss; Second: Due to optimization of the heating grid, using the hourly consumption data of the tenants. In Pommernweg the second part was the very dominant one, because tenants have a very similar heating behaviour there, so that the heating parameter was adjusted for the whole heating grid. An estimation of the saving potential was done by comparison with similar settlements. It seems that savings over 20% are reachable.

Partners

With a housing stock of approximately 7,300 housing units Spar- und Bauverein Solingen eG is one of the biggest Housing Cooperatives in Germany.

The envi-GmbH Engineer and Consulting Company GmbH is an innovative engineering office from Witten, Germany.