Matthias Sulzer from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology(Empa) and his colleague Michael Wetter from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California are advocating a paradigm shift in the planning of building and energy systems. “Due to the complexity and required flexibility of future energy systems and the urgency of change, today’s planning processes are not suitable,” explains Sulzer, who heads Empa’s Urban Energy Systems department and is also a researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in an Empa press release. “There is little to no interaction between the disciplines in order to design buildings or energy infrastructures as a holistic system.”
Sulzer and Wetter are in favour of transferring the so-called platform-based design developed for the automation of chip production to the planning of building and energy systems. The methodology is based on various levels of abstraction on which mutually influencing systems are holistically analysed and optimised. Generally valid models are created at each level, which specify how a system is to be defined and built. The individual models can then be individually combined in practice. Such a paradigm shift could “revolutionise our planning, construction and operating processes and promote the digitalisation and automation that are essential for achieving our ambitious decarbonisation goals,” says Sulzer.
