Project meeting in the LOCAL research project

🔔Project meeting in the LOCAL research project – open-source planning tool for climate-neutral neighborhoods

From Tuesday to Thursday last week, the project partners IREES GmbH, the DLR Institute of Networked Energy Systems and the Geo-Energy Competence Christian-Albrechts of Kiel University met in Karlsruhe for an intensive exchange of ideas on the LOCAL project. The focus was on the further development of our planning tool, which brings together different technologies and site conditions for climate-neutral districts with a focus on the use of near-surface geothermal energy. The insights into the ongoing research work of the work packages were particularly exciting:

🏠 Building modeling & district load profiles
→ Generation of hourly load profiles for heating, hot water and electricity based on building typologies, user behavior and climate regions

🌡️ Waste heat & environmental heat potentials
→ Identification of potential waste heat sources from data centers, supermarkets, etc. and new approaches for estimating waste heat potential using machine learning.

🌍 Geothermal potentials & underground modeling
→ GIS-supported, automated identification of areas for geothermal probes and coupled 1D/3D models to simulate temperature developments underground over 20 years of operation.

🛠️ Integration & application in the planning tool
→ First workflows on how the complex models and data can be efficiently combined in an energy system optimizer and transferred to neighbourhood planning.

A big thank you to all participants for the intensive discussions, the open exchange and the many ideas for the next steps!

We look forward to further developing the results in the coming months and testing them in two specific use cases in Oldenburg and Karlsruhe – always with the aim of providing scientifically sound and practical support for planning processes for climate-neutral neighborhoods.

IREES-RESEARCH FOR FUTURE 🌍🍃