Valladolid (ES)

The Spanish pilot, known as the FASA pilot, is a 14-storey residential building with four dwellings on each floor. It was built in the 1960s and renovated in 2018 within the REMOURBAN project. Valladolid has a typical Mediterranean climate with warm, dry summers (Csb).

After the earlier renovation, further major works on the building were not easily feasible. This made it a good test case for energy efficiency measures that work within such technical constraints.

BuildON enhanced the building automation network with new measures suited to a building where major renovations are difficult:

• an enhanced building automation and control network (BACN);
• electronic thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs) with connection gateways, enabling intelligent control of the building’s
• radiators based on thermostatic data;
• a second-life battery with its inverter for PV electricity storage.

Data from all systems were brought together through continuous monitoring in a digital twin that integrates the different BuildON tools.

Before BuildON, energy performance monitoring and management needed enhancing, with scope to improve the cross-domain control of energy assets and energy flexibility for the grid. Through the project:

• the HOLISTIC gateway was deployed;
• energy performance monitoring and management were enhanced;
• new AI-based control features improved the cross-domain control of energy assets and optimised energy flexibility for the grid;
• a digital interface for the intelligent control of radiators achieved cost savings without reducing comfort, although large-scale control was not fully implemented;
• a digital twin was generated to support energy performance simulation and operation;
• the pilot demonstrated the viability of a proposed new business model for Veolia.

Residents were engaged from the earliest stages. A public information meeting introduced them to the smart readiness indicator (SRI) tool and the energy efficiency improvements planned within BuildON, raising awareness of smart building technologies and promoting good energy-saving practices.

Before the installation, briefing sessions explained the planned IoT thermostatic radiator valves and battery storage works. In these sessions, residents scheduled appointments and agreed where the devices would be placed in their apartments. A paper-based household survey then collected information on occupancy patterns, daily routines, time spent at home and thermal comfort preferences. This data was integrated into the occupant behaviour service to customise heating schedules and improve both control strategies and comfort.

The main challenge was achieving robust, high-quality data interoperability and data sharing for the building. To address it, Veolia developed an API with standard variable names that allows both data collection and control execution over setpoint variables. The pilot points to three recommendations for future deployments:

• build a shared understanding of every data point among partners through a progressive process covering all available pilot data;
• plan an extended demonstration period in a real environment for control strategies, since simulated scenarios are highly imprecise;
• analyse the installation’s operation through data before deploying any tool, so that a consistent baseline is in place to evaluate impact.

Future work should focus on large-scale control strategies for real-time optimisation and prediction of heating consumption, and on advanced data analysis to improve model validation across the more than 1,000 data points collected. The modular architecture based on the Veolia API supports data quality and interoperability and provides a foundation for replication in similar residential buildings connected to heating networks.