Pilot Liège

A big scale digital twin with a cause: monitoring a whole campus   

How much does an university consume in terms of energy? And what would it take to make it self-sustainable through energy trading? This is the question the developers at ULiège will discuss at the Blockchain4Prosumers’ pilot in Liège, in the spring of 2023.  

The technology the team is working on involves the making of a digital twin of the campus. Some specific points of the campus have been chosen to create a relevant network of hotspots from which consumption of electricity is monitored.  

The monitoring of the “expenses” of these spots allows the researchers to make a forecast of how much energy it would be necessary to feed the energetic needs, trading own produced energy from, for example, a PV system on one of the buildings. 

In the image above, you can observe red dots and grey dots. The red ones are active and sending data to the monitoring platform, while the grey dots can be activated on demand in order to change the network topology. All these spots create a network keeping the consumption of the campus under control. 

Thanks to tests on simplified cases, it will be possible to make a simulation of a self-sufficient campus, running on own produced and consumed energy.  

Based on the simulation on the digital twin, the developers will suggest conclusions and recommendation on the benefits of such a monitoring system compared to the current market. In the end of the research, they will be able to propose a market model that could approach the current energy shortage’s situation. 

A nice to know fact: on the monitored network we can identify an hospital. It’s the CHU de Liège. This university hospital is combining the services of an hospital with the education of medical students and research. In this case, the hospital’s energetic needs are being monitored in order to be able to evaluate what it would take to feed his energy needs in a system of own produced energy trading.

Contact:
Pierre-Henri Lefebvre
ph.lefebvre@ulg.ac.be

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