The TOPAS (Tools for Continuous Building Performance Auditing) project was launched in November 2015 and consists of an international consortium of academic and industrial partners led by Motorola Solutions. It is busily engaged in developing a set of analytical tools aimed at minimising the gap between predicted and annual energy consumption in blocks of buildings. The project is aiming to reduce that gap to 10 percent and contribute to reduced energy consumption in the pilot regions by 20 percent. The project outcomes will be tested and validated in three representative sites of commercial and public buildings in Ireland and France.
The project has recently completed connection of the first pilot buildings at the Cork Institute of Technology, aimed at reducing energy consumption. These buildings were connected with an early prototype of the TOPAs project cloud-based analytic platform.
“Successfully connecting the buildings at the Cork Institute of Technology proves the feasibility of our architectural approach” said Boris Kantsepolsky, business development manager, Motorola Solutions Israel and TOPAs project coordinator. “This is an important milestone for the TOPAs consortium on the path towards full platform validation, which begins during next year. We are confident that our fruitful collaboration will facilitate us in achieving the ambitious Project goals - leveraging the potential of energy efficiency solutions for new businesses, taking another big step towards a more sustainable world.”
According to reports from World Energy Outlook, buildings in the western world are accountable for approximately 40 percent of total energy consumption. This in turn contributes 30 percent to the world’s total CO2 emissions. Extensive evidence shows that buildings usually do not perform as well as predicted. The cloud-based (TOPAs) project will provide better visibility on how energy-related decisions impact management, cost, air quality and comfort of buildings’ occupants.
The TOPAs international consortium brings together multidisciplinary and complementary partners from academia, small to medium enterprise and industry. Led by Motorola Solutions Israel, the TOPAs consortium consists of the Cork Institute of Technology, The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Azimut Monitoring, Energy Solutions, Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, IBM Research Ireland, Technical University Dresden and EMBIX. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under a grant agreement.
Image: TOPAS Project
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