Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - QUANTUM (Quality management for building performance - improving energy performance by life cycle quality management)

Teaser

Buildings are the world’s largest CO2-producers. The rise of technical building systems and sophisticated building automation systems opens new possibilities to improve building performance, to reduce emissions and enhance indoor environmental qualities.At the same time, the...

Summary

Buildings are the world’s largest CO2-producers. The rise of technical building systems and sophisticated building automation systems opens new possibilities to improve building performance, to reduce emissions and enhance indoor environmental qualities.
At the same time, the increasing complexity of these systems overstrains engineers, contractors and facilities managers. These factors result in significant performance gaps between designed intended operation and real operation, estimated to be as much as 25% in additional energy consumption.
Due to this severe lack of quality, society is wasting a tremendous potential to fight climate change and improve the space in which we spend 95% of our lives, the indoor environment.
The objective of the QUANTUM project is therefore to develop and demonstrate pragmatic services and appropriate tools supporting quality management in the design, construction, commissioning and operation phase as a means to close this gap in European buildings. The project integrates different innovative ICT-driven tools supporting the quality management process into building and energy services:
• The Performance Test Bench can be used to specify and test functions of building services;
• NG9 can be used to cost-effectively meter a variety of physical parameters in buildings;
• The Comfortmeter is a web service to evaluate perceived indoor environment qualities;
Within QUANTUM, partners will develop the tools to readiness level 7 and to apply and demonstrate them on a representative set of European buildings. The set of demonstrators will include different building types in several European countries. Furthermore, the tools will be applied within different services like engineering, performance contracting or re-commissioning.
Thereby, QUANTUM will introduce the new and urgently needed role of an independent quality management service and at the same time demonstrate the powerful potential of innovative ICT tool to facilitate these services on a large scale.

Work performed

The first 18 month of the project focused on research and specifications for quality management processes, the development of the three tools, related services and exploitation and on first activities for dissemination.
In the building industry, the process of quality management and corresponding roles and responsibilities are, so far, not well defined. Within QUANTUM we defined a generic quality management process based on a control loop of set point, measured value, evaluation and impact. This principle has been applied to relevant phases in the building live cycle, especially to avoid the gap (design – commissioning), to close the gap (commissioning – operation) and to keep the gap closed (operation). The processes can be implemented into different service concepts like conventional building projects, performance contracting or re-commissioning.
The three partners that are carrying out the development of tools within QUANTUM have defined detailed specifications for the enhancement of their tools. Then, the partners implemented the requirements into their tools. After testing the new functionalities internally, the tools have been applied to a first series of three demo buildings in Prague/Czech Republic, Vienna/Austria and Braunschweig/Germany. Learnings have again been implemented into the tools to be tested in the upcoming second demo phase.
Although the project dissemination was supposed to have its focus in later phases of the project, we have been unexpectedly successful in gaining attention for QUANTUM. Besides the regularly planned measures for dissemination such as publications, workshops, website etc., REHVA and synavision have joined the French company ABCE CxC that will define a quality management certification process for building commissioning. In Germany, IGS supported the definition of the “AMEV recommendation Technical Monitoring” defining quality management as a third party service for public administrations and officially released in July 2017.

Final results

After completion of the first phase of tool development, we now have three highly scalable ICT tools to improve energy efficiency and indoor environmental qualities of buildings with truly innovative features:
• The Performance Test Bench by synavision GmbH/Germany is the first software-as-a-service to specify and test functionalities of building services ready to be applied in completely digital services.
• NG9 by Energy Team/Italy allows for multiple easy to install and cost effective metering and corresponding web services.
• Comfortmeter by Factor 4/Belgium is the first web service to reliably measure and evaluate indoor environmental qualities in physical and monetary terms.
The tools with their innovative features are now ready for application on larger scale in phase two.
As first step for exploitation and business plans, the companies have estimated the potential impact of their tools.
• synavision estimates the addressable market in Germany for the Performance Test Bench to be about b€ 1 for new construction and existing buildings. Abatement cost for CO2, that had been calculated to be below 0.1 €/kWh*a) are expected to be confirmed in the second demo phase.
• Energy Team estimates that the abatement cost of NG9 is on average 50% per point of measure and the installation cost is reduced up to 80% compared with traditional current transformer meters. The Italian market has been analysed and considering there is a target of 3% of companies that are legally obliged to install energy monitoring systems (17000 companies have performed an energy audit in 2015 under art. 8 of EED in Italy and are now subject to the mandatory monitoring of at least 40% of their consumption) 2.5 M€ of turnover generated is expected by the end of 2018.
• Factor4 estimates the total market of Comfort surveys in the European Union of 3,000 surveys each year. The employee productivity improvement that can be realised in an average building and that can be discovered by a Comfortmeter survey, amounts to 7.8 €/m². Furthermore, a Comfortmeter survey will typically also reveal the malfunctioning of the HVAC and lighting system, and by doing this detect an energy saving, thus CO2-emission reduction potential. The average detected energy saving/ CO2-emission reduction potential will be estimated in the next phase of the project.
All three partners receive positive feedback from the market and have been able to generate first business success beyond the QUANTUM project.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.quantum-project.eu.