GreenerBuilding office of the future

The University of Groningen is going to play an important role in ‘GreenerBuildings’, a European project on saving energy in commercial buildings and offices. This will involve developing software and sensors for a system that will attune the energy consumption in a building to the activities that are taking place there at a certain moment in time.

GreenerBuildings is an EU project in which the University of Groningen, Eindhoven University of Technology, the University of Rome, the Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan, Philips, EnOcean GmbH and Fluid Solutions are participating. The EU contribution will be EUR 1.85 million.

People spend a lot of their time in offices, commercial buildings and hospitals so they need to have comfortable lighting and efficient climate control.
So it’s hardly surprising that a great deal of our energy consumption is in this type of building. In Europe, commercial buildings are responsible for forty percent of total energy consumption – in the UK and Switzerland it’s even as high as fifty percent. Commercial and industrial buildings spend about thirty percent of their accommodation costs on the energy bill.

The aim of GreenerBuildings is to design an integrated control and operating system to save energy in these types of building. Important aspects include:
- developing systems that notice activities and ensure that the energy use is adapted to the activity
- developing systems that adapt energy use to conditions in a certain area (for example, by turning off the air conditioning if the windows are open)
- developing sensors that do not use any energy themselves or extract the energy they need from their environment
- testing these systems in buildings.

The project will be coordinated by Eindhoven University of Technology and the University of Groningen. Prof. Marco Aiello and Dr Alexander Lazovik of the Johann Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Groningen are Technical Manager and Local Principal Investigator, respectively.

More information: Prof. Marco Aiello: tel: 050-363 3948/3939, e-mail: m.aiello rug.nl