Intelligent energy management is absolutely fundamental today. The specialized company Eaton recently created an interesting system in a Dutch hotel which well illustrates the concept of “transversal electrification”
Nothing is better than a practical example, right? So, let’s immediately visit the Florian Hotel, a 150–room design accommodation facility, not far from Schiphol airport, in Amsterdam, for which Eaton has created an electrical system that allows it to contain costs and CO2 emissions.
The project developed by Eaton for the hotel is based on the combination of solar energy, thanks to the installation of a 30 kWp photovoltaic system on the roof, and energy storage in special xStorage batteries 40 kW of power and 50 kWh of capacity. Eaton calls it “Building as a Grid Approach”, scalable and dynamic: in fact, the complex structure of the hotel (in whose car park various charging units for electric vehicles have been installed) required dynamic management of the demand for load, and the Buildings Energy Management Software (BEMS) responds to this need, whose algorithms on the one hand direct the available energy where it is most needed, and on the other dynamically manage the use of the xStorage system batteries, to replace the energy from the grid when necessary. This is why the system is “transversal”: it exploits both the connection to the grid and the own production of electricity, with measures that allow both uses to be optimised. The BEMS software, in fact, is able to analyze the hotel’s energy consumption and monitor weather forecasts to ensure maximum exploitation of the solar panels, thus reducing both the structure’s energy costs and CO₂ emissions.
Finally, the system was set in “peak shaving” operating mode, which requires the batteries to intervene only when a predefined load threshold is exceeded, ensuring the cutting of peak consumption from the network and allowing significant economic savings.
Throughout Europe, there are more and more companies and structures that aim to achieve the objectives of reducing CO2 emissions by investing in electricity. However, when it comes to expanding network capacity, several difficulties arise. In Europe, only Finland has an open and accessible electricity grid, while in many other countries, including Italy, grid accessibility constraints represent a significant obstacle to the electrification process.
Eaton’s approach called “Buildings as a Grid” for the energy transition allows us to overcome the limitations of an inadequate grid connection: the Florian Hotel was a rather old office building, and is today a hotel that takes full advantage of renewable energies. The owner is enthusiastic about the result: “The Buildings as a Grid system applied to the Florian is achieving exceptional results. In 2022, despite soaring energy prices, we kept costs under control and reduced CO₂ emissions by more than 15 tonnes compared to the average for a similarly sized building and, crucially, stayed within our network coverage: otherwise, we might have been forced to close”, he said.
https://www.florian-hotels.com/
