Work Package 6 describes the RENergetic activities in the Segrate-OSR Pilot site.

The objective of this work package is to integrate monitoring of the Ospedale San Raffaele (OSR) multi-vector energy sources and data streams by enabling big data mining and AI oriented methods applications in this Energy Island. A key objective is to demonstrate that forecasting, machine learning and other AI oriented computational approaches can inform decision making for higher energy management intelligence and energy choice by the Energy Managers coordinating the Energy Island systems.

The technical solutions are all oriented towards increasing global energy optimization, energy waste reduction and sensitivity methods to maximize independence and global multi-vector optimization. The objectives are satisfied by developing methods in OSR hospital research domain, local level, and then evaluated for feasibility and scalability at the wider neighboring Segrate municipality in Milano, the global level. At the heart of such technical solutions, it is fundamental to engage in and meet adequate social adoption levels of the Energy Island as well.

During the second period of the project (from month 19 to month 30) the exploration and the understanding of what kind of data could be accessible from the OSR building has been carried out. This data sorting has been addressed by the principal goals of the project. In addition, in this period different ML models have been developed and tested in the Kubeflow environment.

This activity has led to the identification of one of the OSR’s buildings (I.e., ICEBERG) as a source of data manageable by the RENergetic prediction and analysis algorithms. ICEBERG is a new structure in OSR (built in 2021) that represents the surgical pole of the hospital, as it is one of the more advanced surgical hospital departments in Milan.

The recent construction of this building has brought with it the possibility to install new technologies and sensors allowing to get access to different data with a powerful granularity both in time and in space. The data that are used in the RENergetic algorithmic pipeline mainly interest heat and electricity consumption. These data, added to other information from the building (e.g., internal and external temperature and weather data and occupancy rate), are useful for the simulation of the application of RENergetic algorithms scheduled for the months of October and November 2023. Additionally, the information processed by the RENergetic algos regarding the consumption of the building will be shown on the public dashboard.

The data from ICEBERG building will be real-time pushed onto the RENergetic dedicated API.

In addition to the use of ICEBERG data, the exploration of other type of data/data sources has led to the identification of those data that can be accessed by the Electric Vehicles charging stations. In OSR there are ten charging stations, five for employees and five for citizens.

Despite these stations do not show a recent technology (i.e. they are not automated one but manual one, meaning that is not possible to modify directly the amount of energy they distribute in time), they can offer real-time data regarding the use of electricity both when they are used by user for charging their vehicles and when they are not used as in standby mode.

Periodically the data collected from the charging stations through excel files will be provided to RENergetic system for advanced simulations and tests.

Regarding monthly consumption data of the public buildings in Segrate Municipality, are now available from 2 different platforms, while daily data consumption is available only about the 20 most consuming buildings. For both cases data aren’t readable in real time but only 1-2 months later, it depends on the platform. Concerning the production data, only one public building has got PV.

Based on this, it was fixed a geographical area in a specific neighborhood of the city called Segrate Centro where we can find several main public buildings belonging to different functional categories. Subsequent steps will be needed to identify next installation of PV or, generally, energy efficiency projects and create a time schedule of all those interventions in order to show the improvement to the citizens.

Furthermore, OSR and Segrate team proceeded with the distribution of two surveys related to heat demand response and several focus groups and workshops with the scope of presenting RENergetic project and providing awareness to employees of OSR and citizens of Segrate district. They collected feedback of end users and then provided them to WP2 team to analyze and use this information in different development activities of the project. 

Several focus groups, workshops and social activities have been planned for the next period, and the aim is to involve more people, using more institutional social media platforms.