Recently the Digital Resilience Institute (DRI) has emerged victorious in securing its first Horizon Europe innovation project, setting the stage for innovation and sustainability in the realm of urban development. The project called BIPED (Building Intelligent Positive Energy Districts) is focused on Positive Energy Districts (PED), marks a significant milestone for DRI and promises to reshape the future of urban environments.
Positive clean Energy District’s are a key building block in the future energy paradigm for carbon-neutral cities and communities. Unlike traditional city layouts, PEDs prioritize energy efficiency, sustainability, and the well-being of their inhabitants. These districts aim not only to reduce energy consumption but to generate more energy than they consume, creating a surplus that can be shared with the larger grid. With the rise of modern technology, local digital twins – the digital representations of a functional territory combining low- and high-velocity data with dynamic models – play a significant role in PED development and the scaling of it, supporting decision makers and planners in taking informed decisions towards a sustainable future.
However, by focusing narrowly on energy and mobility topics confined to the traditional sectors, digital twins for PEDs lack representation of significant aspects such as social, economic, and environmental properties, and hence, draw only part of the picture of a district or a city. Limited by data availability and lacking awareness of existing data, this shortcoming in digital twin modelling for PEDs leads to suboptimal decisions, impacting negatively the ambitious efforts of sustainable development in cities and communities. This becomes even more clear when reflecting on the scalability issues across the 80,000 municipalities in the EU27: as highly complex entities, cities and communities differ in their physical, social, economic and even cultural structures, making it challenging to replicate PEDs in a trivial way across Europe.
The BIPED project demonstrates how to overcome these barriers in a simple yet highly efficient manner that works everywhere by answering three key questions to push PEDs to the next level: wide deployment.
How can digital twins be extended to refine a district’s profile representation, guiding PED design and demonstrators?
How can the quantitative collection of soft data support the advancement in digital twin development?
How to boost the replication potential of PED solutions for climate neutral cities with reinforced decision-makings
BIPED is led by the Danish Technical University (DTU) and contains 13 partners from organisations across Europe working together to address the questions above. The Digital Resilience Institute founders have long been at the forefront of innovative solutions for urban challenges and are delighted by the securing of this project. The Positive Energy Districts project holds immense promise for society and the environment. By creating urban spaces that generate more energy than they consume, the initiative contributes significantly to the global efforts to combat climate change. Additionally, residents of these districts will enjoy improved quality of life, reduced energy costs, and a sense of pride in living in environmentally conscious communities.
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