It is in urban areas that the demand for heating and cooling demand assumes highest density. At the same time a huge amount of low-grade waste heat is diffused within the urban texture, the largest amount being rejected by air-conditioners, cooling systems in industrial processes and tertiary buildings (i.e. dry coolers and wet cooling towers), datacentres’ chillers and supermarkets’ refrigeration systems. Moreover, for historic reasons, cities have born along rivers, lakes and seashores. All these sources make low-temperature renewable energy available, which utilisation is highly replicable because it is accessible right where it is needed. Having this in mind, the overall objective of REWARDHeat is to demonstrate a new generation of low-temperature district heating and cooling networks, which will be able to recover low-grade renewable and waste heat available at low temperature. Focusing on the exploitation of the energy sources available within the urban context allows to maximize the replicability potential of the decentralized solutions developed in the project. REWARDHeat will promote punctual metering, thermal storage management, network smart control as means to enable and optimise the exploitation of renewable and waste heat in DHC networks. At the same time, this approach permits a change of paradigm with respect to the business models devised: thermal energy will not be seen as a commodity anymore, rather it will be sold as a service to the customers.

“With a user-centric design, we will contribute to next-generation District Heating & Cooling systems” The OPTi project aspires to create a long-lasting impact by rethinking the way DHC systems are architected and controlled. The overarching goal is to create business benefit for the industry as well as to ensure optimal end-consumer satisfaction. OPTi will deliver methodologies and tools that will enable accurate modelling, analysis and control of current and envisioned DHC systems. The methodology will be deployed both on a complete system level, and on the level of a building(s). OPTi will treat the DHC system as a system subject to dynamic control, and will treat thermal energy as a resource to be controlled for DHC systems towards saving energy and reducing peak loads. This will lead to the most environmentally-friendly way of utilizing energy sources, thus reducing the reliance on additional boilers running on oil and/or electricity and overall providing a socio-economically sustainable environment. OPTi will help energy companies to operate both today’s and future DHC systems in an optimal way: • System level: We envision opportunities for SMEs to provide new services/solutions • House level: More intelligent home DHC control systems like remote control and the consumer “virtual knob” ( • General: We foresee that the OPTi framework will enable engineers to design and plan DHC Luleå Energi AB invests 45 MEUR (2014-2018) in their DHC to meet the requirements from the expanding Luleå City. This will enhance the system and allow for new solutions to be deployed and is directly beneficial for this project. • Saving 30% of energy for water and heating on a system level • Saving 30-40% of peak consumption on houses/clusters of houses • Promote ways of operating today’s and future DH/DC systems in more optimized and environmentally friendly way including alternative energy sources and energy storage methods

The digitalization of the energy sector enables higher levels of operational excellence with the adoption of disrupting technologies. The Energy Big Data framework of the modern smart energy networks provides an ideal ecosystem for knowledge exploitation from data. PLATOON pretends to deploy distributed/edge processing and data analytics technologies for optimized real-time energy system management in a simple way for the energy domain expert. The data governance among the different stakeholders for multi-party data exchange, coordination and cooperation in the energy value chain will be guaranteed through IDS based connectors. The project will develop and use the PLATOON reference architecture, COSMAG-compliant, for building and deploying scalable and replicable energy management solutions that contribute to increased renewable energy consumption, smart grids management, increased energy efficiency and optimised energy asset management. The PLATOON architecture and components are valuable for the different stakeholders of energy sector value chain, starting from electricity supplier, passing through the distributor, the aggregator, the ESCo until the End User. the project will be validated in 7 pilots of 4 countries that provide real Energy Big Data cases. It proposes to build the solution based on existing European standards and initiatives for managing the pilots’ data, for the access, models, interfaces, governance and sovereignty. It also foresees to report back the results to the different standardization working groups. PLATOON will facilitate the technology transfer into the market by a well established tendering process through Open Calls. The project will reinforce the European efforts for modernisation of the European electricity grid, because it focuses the attention to new smart grids services through data knowledge exploitation. Finally, the project will offer access to cheaper and sustainable energy for energy consumers and maximise social welfare.