GTB: Mastering energy

There is one field of application in which supervision can generate quantifiable savings and fast ROI, energy control.

In terms of building technical management, supervision offers many benefits: comfort and quality of service, flexible and effective time programming, easy remote intervention, data collection and recording.

But beyond instant technical alarms and subsequent analysis of results unsatisfactory in terms of energy balance, some aspects remained to be explored to achieve perfect supervision:

Facilitate the use of applications  in a field where we are more accustomed to using integrated systems rather than configuring supervisors and programming controllers.

Find, half-way between alarms and reports, appropriate indicators for alarms on energy consumption to ensure just in time intervention

To meet these issues, AREAL has engaged an R&D program together with the CSTB, with the financial backing of the ADEME. Based on the works performed by the CSTB for schools and pools (EMMA software), the following functions were developed for TOPKAPI:

creation of standard templates dedicated to heating system monitoring, ensuring easy implementation of applications by non specialists

creation of comfort and over consumption fault indicators with sensitivity setting (focusing priority on the most severe anomalies)

automatic generation of energy balances

comparison tools used to evaluate absolute performance per m2 in each building, compared with other buildings or the previous year, while taking the DJU (Degré Jour Unifiés, Unified Degree per Day) into account.

A first pilot project was led in collaboration with the communauté urbaine of Strasbourg. The latter has extensive expertise in field requirement, with a background in remote management of its constructed lots going back to 1985. Using the TOPKAPI software since 1996, it has a long history of data ensuring it can assess the benefits provided by the new developments.

We already know that beyond consumption savings achieved, mastering energy balances ensures better sizing of new equipment: indeed, in the past and lacking precise data, most of the time the power chosen for heating devices exceeded requirements by far.

In addition, TOPKAPI was chosen by the town of Les Mureaux as the GTC for its new administration section. First prize at the call for projects by the ADEME on experimenting with HQE certification (Haute Qualité Environnementale), this structure was designed within compliance of the main requirements of the HQE procedure. In February 2005, it will be the first delivered among the 22 candidates in the list of structures retained for this experiment.