“Endogenous energy efficiency improvement of large-scale retrofit in the Swiss residential building stock and one industry sector”

Future energy use depends on energy efficiency improvement (EEI). In standard analyses of Swiss energy and climate policies, the speed and extent of EEI is usually assumed to be unaffected even by policies designed to foster innovation. This project aims at introducing endogenous EEI and barriers to innovation into a complete simulation model of the Swiss economy and will show what difference that makes for energy policies in housing and one industry sector. The main goal of this research is to introduce a new methodology in an existing economic model of the Swiss economy aiming at a better representation of the acceleration of energy efficiency improvements due to energy and climate policy. The secondary goal is to illustrate this by assessing the impacts of a set of real or realistic policies on the diffusion and adoption of technologies associated with energy consumption in Switzerland, and ultimately on energy use as well as structural changes.

“VIA: Advancing Clean Energy and Smart Grids through Data Sovereignty”

Via Science, Inc. (VIA) helps energy companies and governments safely and securely connect their data to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms that enable grid operators to embrace clean energy. Combined, VIA’s global customers manage more than $1 trillion in infrastructure assets. VIA, now with a full-time presence at the Switzerland Innovation Park Central, has participated in SUEID since 2018. Last year, we announced a new collaboration with Switzerland’s Hochschule Luzern. Together, we were awarded funding for the KnowlEDGE project in conjunction with Romande Energie, focusing on applying federated learning to smart meter data to help utilities with congestion and power quality issues.

This year, we will discuss how the strength of our collaboration has allowed us to learn about the challenges in Switzerland’s quest for smart energy grids, in particular in relation to private access of data to support the Energy Strategy 2050. We will share how our technology can solve issues of data protection and data sovereignty as the country embraces its overall digital and energy transformation.

BlocPower uses data, thermodynamic models, structured finance, IoT, and edge computing to make city buildings, greener, smarter and healthier. Property owners in many communities often spend as much as 30% of total income on energy costs, and in some cases don’t have the capital or credit to access energy saving technologies. BlocPower connects online investors to solar and energy efficiency project microfinance opportunities, and trains and hires local unemployed workers to install all BlocPower retrofits. BlocPower will bring energy efficiency to a new market segment at scale.

“25,000 Volt Charging Station for Battery Trains for “Instant” Rail Electrification”

A few weeks from now, Furrer+Frey AG, Bern CH, will be testing a multi-megawatt charging station that can charge a battery train in just a few minutes at a train station. This ultra-fast charge is more than enough to power the train to the next charging station. Charging battery trains with these powerful high voltage chargers while stopped at a station avoids the cost and long planning and construction times required for installing overhead lines along a track. Now, charging stations can be installed in a matter of months and a battery train can completely replace a polluting diesel train, bringing sustainable and quiet rail transportation to many places where this was previously thought to be impossible or uneconomic.

In the U.S.A., for example, electrified tracks only comprise around 3% of the total. In many areas, there are no electric trains, and most existing diesel trains are quite old and require replacement. Electrification by overhead line installation is possible, but it is expensive and takes several years. Buying new diesel trains commits a country to a further 30 years of carbon emissions, noise, diesel costs, and pollution by diesel. Replacing diesel trains with battery trains and Furrer+Frey charging stations is a cost effective and simple alternative that can be brought online in a matter of months, rather than years.

Furrer+Frey AG has been a leading specialist in railway electrification for almost 100 years and is based in Bern, Switzerland, with projects worldwide.

Greentown Labs is North America’s largest climatetech incubator, with locations in Somerville, MA, and Houston, TX. Learn about Greentown Labs, its climatetech innovation community, and the role Greentown plays in the ecosystem.

“Dynamic tariffs and Demand-Side Management for a Swiss Distribution System Operator”

Gianluca will describe the role of dynamic pricing of energy and grid fees for a Swiss Utility, as well as discuss the integration of a simple remote control for Electric Vehicles smart charging.

“Flexible Load Management and microgrids for buildings”

Abstract: Utilities continue to migrate towards a more balanced approach of managing both generation and demand across sectors. Our Distributed Energy Resources Management platform is a complete ecosystem that uses intelligent system balancing to help utilities make the most of their energy assets. Flexible Load Management through intelligent power panel control, as well as cloud to cloud smart device control, offers utility operators predictable, dispatchable loads, with virtually no interruption to consumers’ daily routines. Utilities can leverage detailed real-time and hyper-localized information on residential and commercial distributed energy resources within a service area.

“A liberal climate policy for Switzerland”

The anthropogenic influence on climate development is demonstrable. At the international level, attempts are being made to limit global warming by means of the Paris Agreement. But non-compliance with the nationally determined contributions (NDC) does not result in sanctions by the international community. In addition, the sum of the reduction targets submitted so far suggests that the 1.5 °C degree target will be missed.
Switzerland is responsible for about 0.1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Electricity production is low in CO2 compared to other countries, and many measures have already been taken to increase energy efficiency. Nevertheless, Switzerland should try to fulfill its international commitments. To this end, a new study by Avenir Suisse proposes four levels of action for Switzerland. In addition, it identifies four criteria against which climate measures – not only in Switzerland – can be assessed and compared in terms of their suitability before they are politically adopted.

“Energy Lab”

The Energy Lab is one of 12 New Thematic Networks (NTN) Innovation Boosters currently supported by Innosuisse, Switzerland’s innovation agency. Its goal is seed funding of new, fresh ideas leading to larger projects. The Energy Lab collects challenges, supports network forming, assists with searching for experts, and helps the newly formed teams with training in ideation and design thinking. In pitch@enrich workshops, the challenges are brought to first solution approaches. A pitch jury can grant same-day direct financing in small amounts between CHF 5,000 and 25,000. More than 200 companies and institutions such as MIT, Swissnex in Boston and San Francisco are founding supporters. Ventures, experts and projects are managed within an online platform (jointly created). Special attention is paid to the advancement of female students and researchers. The official launch date was January 21 earlier this year. With the first workshop on April 21, nine projects are already seed-funded, and many leads are incoming. One specific Swiss-US project will be a student exchange of 10 graduate students from Switzerland staying one month in Boston/Cambridge (as soon traveling restrictions allow it). They will work together with MIT students on a problem about thermal energy storage for transport of food from remote rural areas to cities in developing regions in Asia. In this short presentation the Energy Lab will be presented with opportunities for Swiss-US projects. The student exchange project will be highlighted.

“Introducing earth-abundant compound semiconductors as absorbers in solar cells”

Some compound semiconductors such as GaAs and InGaAsP exhibit a high absorption coefficient in the photon energy of interest for solar energy conversion. Their commercial potential in terrestrial applications is reduced due to the scarcity (and thus high cost) of group III elements such as indium and gallium. In this talk we present two approaches to render the use of this kind of materials sustainable: a strong reduction in material use through nanostructures and the replacement of group III by group II such as zinc. We find nanostructures also provide a path to increase light collection [1]. We show how II-V compounds such as Zn3P2 exhibit one magnitude higher absorption coefficient than GaAs [2]. We explain how these materials can be fabricated with high crystal quality, opening the path for the creation of alternative and sustainable compound semiconductor solar cells [3-5].

References:
[1] P. Krogstrup et al Nature Photon 7, 306 (2013)
[2] M.Y. Swinkels et al Phys. Rev. Appl. 14, 024045 (2020)
[3] S. Escobar Steinvall et al Nanoscale Horizons 5, 274-282 (2020)
[4] R. Paul et al, Crys. Growth. Des. 20, 3816–3825 (2020)
[5] S. Escobar Steinval et al. Nanoscale Adv. 3, 326 (2021)

UniSieve provides membrane solutions for a broad range of applications. Discover the company’s mission and how it relates to the hydrogen economy with CEO of the company, Samuel Hess.

“Adaptive occupant-centric smart controls for the healthy and sustainable built environment”

The behavior of occupants is one of the most significant sources of uncertainty for optimal scheduling and operation of building energy systems, particularly HVAC and DHW systems. On top of that, not only energy use and comfort of occupants but also health aspects should be considered since people spend more than 90% of their time indoors. Given the critical role of occupants in the energy use of buildings, adaptive occupant-centric controls incorporating IoT technologies and Machine Learning methods are the next generation of controls in buildings. To empower the well-being and sustainability of the built environment, we have developed Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based dynamic control frameworks for space heating and domestic hot water systems. DRL-based controls applied to indoor space conditioning can balance energy use, indoor thermal comfort, and the metabolic health of occupants. Applied to DHW systems, the hygiene criteria to reduce the risk of harmful Legionella bacteria in the water system is considered. Such controls have the potential to continuously adapt to the stochastic behavior of occupants, the time-varying environmental conditions, and system aging.

“Aligned Electrodes — Path to Fast-Charging Lithium-Ion Batteries”

The climate crisis requires the world to find technological solutions to reduce global CO2 emissions. Electric vehicles (EVs) offer the possibility for sustainable transportation, but some aspects of today’s batteries still hamper the wide range adoption of electric vehicles. A key requirement for EVs is the ability to charge them quickly. Fast-charging of today’s Lithium-ion Batteries (LIB) is limited by the negative electrode. Over 95% of all LIB use graphite as the negative electrode. However, the microstructure of the electrodes used today is not suitable to enable a fast flow of lithium ions through the electrode. Battrion has developed and patented the Aligned Graphite® Technology (AGT) – an efficient and scalable new platform technology for the production of high performing electrodes that are integrated into LIB cells. AGT significantly increases battery cells charging and discharging speed and reduces heat generation while retaining energy density and life time.

“Efficiency and Resilience in Energy Systems”

Rolling blackouts and ten thousand percent elevated electricity prices throughout and after a disruption are not characteristics of an ideal, or even adequate, energy system. Yet, the polar vortex in mid-February 2021 resulted in a demand and supply shock leading to an almost complete failure of the Texas power grid due to temperatures well outside the bounds of expected infrastructure operation. The fundamental lack of winterization, and continued undervaluing of other resilience strategies, resulted in severe consequences for over 26 million people and critical facilities relying on basic electric needs, including over 60% of Texas homes heated by electricity (ACS 2019).

Although an array of safety measures, industry protocols, and regulations govern the overall energy system (defined herein as electricity generation and the underlying infrastructure and value chains in place for its production, transmission, and distribution), decisions must still be made on how to best utilize scarce resources and maximize return on investment, without compromising longer-term insurance strategies that enable system function during outlier events. At the heart of this decision-making, is the role of efficiency, which in a perfect environment, free of uncertainty and disruptions, ensures operational and economic sustainability (Trump et al. 2020). However, disruptions to the energy system are inevitable.

BamCore is harnessing the power of timber bamboo and industrialized construction techniques to decarbonize the built environment. By sustainably utilizing timber bamboo’s strength to green engineer a fully customizable, code-compliant, studless dual-wall framing solution. We provide a framing solution that is stronger, greener, thermally superior, healthier, safer, quieter, and more quickly installed than any other conventional building method and material available today.

“U.S. Vehicle Electrification Infrastructure Assessment”

Atlas Public Policy research shows that to achieve 100 percent passenger electric vehicle sales by 2035 and put the nation on the path to full electrification, over $87 billion in investments in charging infrastructure will be needed over the next decade, including $39 billion for public charging. The need for consistent charging access throughout the country is essential to enable widespread electric vehicle adoption. Public charging infrastructure investments have emerged as a critical gap, however, since the direct revenue from providing these services often does not cover the costs of installation and operation of the equipment. The Atlas analysis demonstrates what would be required to fully fund public charging infrastructure (see figure below). The analysis also found that achieving 100 percent passenger electric vehicle sales by 2035 will require the installation of an estimated 495,000 public and workplace charging ports, a finding similar to the 500,000 EV chargers called for in the American Jobs Plan.

Our findings are only available for passenger vehicles at this time but we will have medium- and heavy-duty vehicle estimates very soon.

“Combining traditional and data-driven methods in energy systems modeling”

Traditional, mechanistic approaches to modeling the energy consumption of buildings and transportation systems are being increasingly replaced by data-driven methods, enabled through the growing availability of corresponding datasets and methods. For example, researchers are using GPS-derived mobility traces to study mobility energy consumption in cities, and smart-meter-gathered energy consumption profiles to forecast energy consumption of buildings. Data-driven methods are not without issues, however: parameters often are not easily interpretable; the models often have little explanatory power; and they are often not transferable to a different (e.g., geographical) context. Combining traditional modeling approaches with data-driven methods can help to alleviate these issues and enable us to get the best of both worlds. Here, we introduce examples of such “hybrid” models that our lab developed, focusing on an urban mobility energy model. We illustrate how we combine a traditional modeling approach with a data-driven layer to get the best of both worlds and to produce a flexible, interpretable, transferable model.

Gilytics is committed to provide a fast computing and 3D visualization technology for complex planning of transportation and energy infrastructures and to increase the public participation and social acceptance between public authorities and local communities involved in a project.

“VIA: Advancing Clean Energy and Smart Grids through Data Sovereignty”

Via Science, Inc. (VIA) helps energy companies and governments safely and securely connect their data to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms that enable grid operators to embrace clean energy. Combined, VIA’s global customers manage more than $1 trillion in infrastructure assets. VIA, now with a full-time presence at the Switzerland Innovation Park Central, has participated in SUEID since 2018. Last year, we announced a new collaboration with Switzerland’s Hochschule Luzern. Together, we were awarded funding for the KnowlEDGE project in conjunction with Romande Energie, focusing on applying federated learning to smart meter data to help utilities with congestion and power quality issues.

This year, we will discuss how the strength of our collaboration has allowed us to learn about the challenges in Switzerland’s quest for smart energy grids, in particular in relation to private access of data to support the Energy Strategy 2050. We will share how our technology can solve issues of data protection and data sovereignty as the country embraces its overall digital and energy transformation.

“It’s time for beautiful and powerful BIPV in the United States”

Peter Roethlisberger will show what is already and what will become possible within the scope of Building-Integrated-Photovoltaics.

Zaphiro Technologies develops SynchroGuard, the first grid monitoring and automation system entirely based on high-speed and time-synchronised measurements from Phasor Measurement Units. SynchroGuard helps power utilities increase the resiliency and reliability of their power grids while preparing them for the upcoming clean energy transition.

Emission Free Flight – The Path to decarbonizing aviation
Climate change is the number one challenge of the modern era. With renewable energy and ground based electric vehicle adoption becoming the norm we now see the results of innovation coupled with opportunity. The next frontier is the electrification and decarbonization of aviation. Dr. Anita Sengupta, a NASA rocket scientist, professor of aerospace engineering, and founder of two electric aviation companies, will discuss the technical challenges, advances, and latest developments in this new flight plan to carbon emission-free flight.

“Navigating the Energy Trilemma – How Data and Algorithms support Decision Making”

The transition to a renewable energy system opens up a rapidly expanding solution space. Energy planners and HVAC engineers have to find the most suitable energy concept out of many possibilities. Optimal energy supply solutions require a trade-off between reliability, cost-effectiveness and sustainability. Today, their work is supported by comprehensive data and algorithms. The energy sector’s digital twin enables energy planners and engineers to offer extensive services to achieve ambitious sustainability goals with minimal costs and maximum safety in their projects.