Fiemser - an innovative controller for residential buildings

FIEMSER is an EU research project that develops a Friendly Intelligent Energy Management System for Existing Residential buildings. The system takes into account the buildings energy demand for heating and cooling as well as user dependent loads from domestic hot water, artificial lighting and household appliances. The activation timeframe of some of these devices can be manipulated without restraining the building's users in their comfort. FIEMSER seeks to shift these timeframes in a way to balance them together with times when locally generated and preferably renewable energy is available. If energy storages are available FIEMSER incorporates them. This does not only reduce the national grid load. Since a certain amount of the energy in the national grid is produced by means of fossil energy carriers the use of locally generated renewable energy also reduces CO2 emissions. For the FIEMSER system an energy reduction of a CO2 emission equivalent of 30 % is targeted. The users' self-defined occupancy schedules will be taken into account for the control strategy and the buildings performance will be optimized taking into account this user information. To prevent the user from feeling governed by the system the user always can overpower the systems decisions. Within the current research project the forecast and optimization algorithms are developed. From existing hardware components a system suitable for building retrofitting will be compiled. The completed system is installed at two test facilities in Spain and Germany for evaluation purposes.