The Arena Innovation Community (AIC) is an energy community located in the municipality of Capriasca, in the Lugano district of southern Switzerland. The community consists of residential and commercial buildings, such as single-family homes, multi-family homes, and condominiums, for a total of eleven buildings with approximately 105 residents, covering a total area of approximately 10,000 m2. The commercial area includes a public swimming pool, a football pitch with various facilities, a designated car park, a restaurant, and a District Heating plant.
Electricity is generated locally by four photovoltaic systems of 85kW, 2x30kW and 22.4kW respectively, while thermal energy for heating is provided by the District Heating system, Heat Pumps and Oil Boilers. The District Heating supplies hot water to some buildings within the community and others outside. The system consists of a biomass thermal plant with a 550kW woodchip boiler, supplemented by a 43m3 thermal storage tank and a piping infrastructure with heat exchangers for each end user. The community also includes a 20kWh/20kW district battery to optimise self-consumption and peak shaving needs, considering the potential aggregation of the plant with other flexibilities available in the area.
Each end-user is equipped with a Smart Meter at the point of connection to the distribution network. The Smart Meters measure net energy with a granularity of 15 minutes, with historical data available from 2022. The electricity production of two photovoltaic systems is measured directly, as well as the district battery and some EV chargers. Dedicated submeters are installed to monitor a central Heat Pump system in a specific block of flats in the community.
All data measurements from the pilot site are collected in a central server at AEM R&D, where a dedicated data platform manages the data by harmonising time series and verifying their quality. This data can be shared anonymously with the project’s technical partners via REST APIs, with the ability to query historical data.
InterPED’s activities in the AIC (i.e. Pilot 3) focus on energy efficiency and optimal asset management to increase self-consumption in the community and to identify possible solutions to avoid energy waste in the pilot, as well as to investigate innovations to optimise the use of flexible assets to improve the integration of the AIC with the local distribution grid.
More specifically, Pilot 3, with the support of the project partners, will work on the following four use cases:
- Optimisation of flexibility management (including e-mobility) for peak shaving and self-consumption maximisation
- Introduce and assess an open marketplace concept that will implement local peer-to-peer energy trading to optimise community resources
- Energy savings opportunities identification and long-term planning
- End user interaction and engagement under cooperative DR strategy
Regarding the implementation activities currently underway in the pilot, by the fourth quarter of 2024 an air-to-air Heat Pump with a capacity of 5 kW will be installed between the District Heating and public swimming pool to increase the heating efficiency of the public pool’s technical rooms by installing the external unit inside the District Heating building, where the delta of temperature between summer and winter is significantly reduced compared to the outdoor environment, allowing for more efficient operation of the air conditioning system. It is also planned to install additional sensors to improve the monitoring of the grid and assets, allowing the technical partners to train and test their solution at the pilot site.
Blog signed: Federico Giani (AEM)