Sotirios Karellas

The project will develop a flexible energy system suitable for building integration based on renewables for covering a large share of energy demand (heating/cooling/electricity). The overall objective is to develop a configuration based on renewables that allows covering all heating and cooling demand and a variable electricity demand (from zero up to even 100%) in a cost-effective manner. This configuration is based on solar, ambient and bioenergy, while it is suitable for various buildings types and sizes without any geographical restriction.

Medium- to large-scale bioenergy utilisation for electricity and combined industrial or district heating is predicted to increase by 160% in 2020 compared to 2010, while carbon emission quotas are becoming stricter. Finding new ways to efficiently utilise cheap and currently unused feedstocks are necessary in order to meet these challenges.

Generating renewable electricity is an important way to reduce CO₂ emissions and tackle climate change. However, sources of renewable energy such as wind and solar suffer from supply and demand imbalances. Energy storage in the form of hydrogen could provide a remedy for this problem: excess renewable electricity is fed into an electrolyser to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The green hydrogen is stored and subsequently used in gas turbines to produce electricity when needed, releasing the stored energy back to the grid.