Day 2: ICT and Energy Efficiency in Buildings

This 2 hour workshop has a wide range of case studies from around Europe about energy efficiency in buildings.

Firstly Begonia Benito Barajas, talking about GAIA, an e-Diana project based in Spain. There are around 25 delegates at the Symposia plus another 10 who are contributors.

Now Alvaro Ros is talking about the HomeSystems project ihe is working on www.ecobox.es

 This is smart management of your home energy - and probably has quite a bit of relevance for the DEHEMS project. This is a user side system for home consumption.

The key questions for this session are _:

- which ICT -based solutions in buildings?
- how can such solutions contribute to tackle energy consumptin and/or make it more efficient?
- How diversity in building it taken in account in the deployment of technical solutions?
- How are these new tools considered by users?

Alvaro Ros is talking about the "user issues" for reducing energy use - the Ecobox can monitor tariffs, schedule programming etc., provide information to the user via the internet etc.

My power will go shortly and I've to give my own presentation but other projects being discussed will include HOSPILOT, (Netherlands) Logica's smart metering work (France), the REEB project from CSTB in France, the Beywatch project from Spain, and Green Data Centers from DSIO de Bouygues Immobilier (France.) There will also be a video presentation from Kan Energy in Norway.

As we hear about the HOSPILOT project within the Netherlands, we've now got about 40 people in the rom in total, all of whom have a keen interest in the area of ICT and energy efficiency in buildings.

I very much like the website of the BeyWatch project - led by Spain but oddly enough has a pilot in the UK, in Loughborough. (Not that odd, but its strange when you hear of a project being the other way round with knowledge transfer from outside of the UK to a small town here!)