FlexGeber

Demonstration of Flexibility Options in the Building Sector and their Interaction with Germany's Energy System

  • Project no.151236
  • Duration 10/2017 - 01/2022

The transformation of Germany's entire energy system in all sectors requires the targeted use and management of flexibilities in the energy system in order to respond to the increasing share of fluctuating renewable energies from wind and solar and thus the strong temporal fluctuations in electricity production.
Within the FlexGeber project, the scientists demonstrated novel heating and cooling technologies as well as new solutions to increase and ensure the quality of energy efficiency and the integration of renewable energies. This was done in three case studies:

  • Fraunhofer ISE campus in the commercial, trade and services sector and
  • food manufacturer Taifun-Tofu and building materials manufacturer Hermann Peter in the industry sector.

These case studies show how the individual energy services electricity, heating and cooling can be made renewable and efficient and how the potential for flexibilisation in industry and the tertiary sector can be increased by linking them. For this purpose, the researchers developed market and operator models that address the interfaces of the heating/cooling and electricity sectors and enable the integration of tertiary and industrial enterprises into the energy industry. They integrated the identified flexibility options in non-residential buildings into a regional and nationwide (German) energy system and energy market model to assess their interaction with the energy system and the associated impacts.

The Wuppertal Institute's research within the project focused on the following sub-projects:

  • Barrier analysis on changes in user behaviour and optimisation of organisational processes to create flexibility in commercial and industrial buildings (WP 2.3).
  • Extrapolation of the technical potential for flexibilisation of the building sector in a national climate neutral scenario for the year 2045 (WP 3.2)
  • Vision and roadmap for greenhouse gas neutral, renewable, energy efficient & flexibly managed non-residential buildings (WP 5.2)

Furthermore, the Wuppertal Institute contributed to the definition of Germany's building typology for non-residential buildings (WP 3.1) and to the tool development for the presentation of the optimisation and marketing processes in the case studies (WP 2.4). Within the framework of WP 3.1, the Institute's own building balancing model HEAT was extended to a bottom-up based heat demand planning differentiated according to 11 building categories and 3 building age classes with the help of the  new non-residential building database ENOB:dataNWG of the Institute for Housing and Environment (IWU).


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