Every year, a selected number of representatives of public authorities, private companies and European associations meet in Brussels at the Sustainable Energy Week, the week about the sustainable energy promoted by the European Commission. The aim is to find inspiration from new ideas and to share practices for safe, green and sustainable energy.
At the 2016 edition, there was great interest regarding the SMARTCIM project. Roberto Cimberio, CEO of Cimberio S.p.A. has explained the innovative system for the regulation of heating/cooling plants, which is able to promise high energy saving; Roberto Cimberio has highlighted the characteristics and potentialities of a really complex idea, but an easy to use.
In the world, there are five and a half million obsolete commercial buildings, which need to be retrofitted from an energetic point of view. There is no point in demolishing them, it would make much more sense to renew them with avant-guard solutions.
SMARTCIM was born to give new life to this big energy consuming building heritage.
The innovation of this project will work on heating/cooling systems of existing buildings, monitoring the consumptions and acting onto optimizing them. The result? A considerable energy saving and a specific help to our environment.
SMARTCIM provides an extremely versatile system, which can be used in very different contexts, environments and situations. Cimberio identified two sites for trials, completely different, and started to work on them.
The first one: four hundred kilometres North of the Arctic Circle, on a Norwegian island, there is the Andoya Space Center, Norway’s Space Research Center. The place is rough and wild, the building housing the technician and the operators needs an intervention for energetic retrofitting. The work for retrofitting has to be focused on the optimization of heating/cooling systems, on efficiency and saving in an extreme environmental situation.
The second is on Orta Lake, in the North of Italy, between water and mountains. A Moorish-style villa, built in 1879. It is called Villa Crespi and is the starred restaurant of Antonino Cannavacciuolo, who is both a chef and a television personality in the Italian edition of MasterChef. It is a historical building, subject to architectural constraints, on which it is necessary to intervene to increase the energy efficiency of the heating/cooling system. Expectations are therefore really high. There has to be great attention to the indoor comfort on one hand and to aesthetic, harmony and elegance on the other.
The mission is multiple: the monitoring and the optimization of consumptions do not lead to a real refurbishment of the buildings, but to their retrofit, their adaptation to current energetic standards.
The goal leads also to ground, disposal and resources saving, in environmental respect.