€1.5m EU funding awarded to Irish ICT efficiency projects
€1.5m in EU Horizon 2020 funding has been awarded to two Irish projects aiming to develop ‘ICT for Energy Efficient Buildings’, which are both based out of The Nimbus Centre at Cork Institute of Technology (CIT).
Three projects were awarded funding after the call for projects by the EU was whittled down from 40 applicants from across the union.
The first successful project to be selected is called TOPA (Tools for Continuous Building Performance Auditing).
Dr Susan Rea, Dr Alan McGibney and their team will develop tools and services to support continuous energy performance monitoring and will use the facilities at CIT to develop TOPAs.
The institute has on campus what is known as the ‘National Sustainable-Building Energy Test-Bed’, which allows researchers to test building energy efficiency technology with the aim of making significant cuts to the amount of energy produced by buildings in line with carbon emission reduction targets.
Will greatly benefit Europe
The second project is MOEEBIUS (Modelling Optimisation of Energy Efficiency in Buildings for Urban Sustainability) where Dr Christian Beder, with Juan Manuel Escaño and Dr Niel Canty, plan to optimise building energy control mechanisms that will allow them to implement automatic fault detection and equipment maintenance.
This will then facilitate the creation of a virtual reality environment allowing building maintenance staff to optimise their work processes.
Dr Dirk Pesch, head of The Nimbus Centre, said of the funding of the two projects: “This is a hugely positive achievement for Irish research, simultaneously elevating the impact of Ireland on the European Energy stage and assisting jobs, education, and innovation at home.”
