High-quality data for municipal heat planning
Project overview
Improve the quality and availability of building energy informationTransParEnergy is developing an innovative methodology for standardizing and linking different building data in order to create digital energy twins of entire districts or cities. To date, there is hardly any comprehensive and up-to-date energy data at the level of individual buildings, but this forms the basis of such an energy twin. The aim is therefore to efficiently record different sources of information and data formats relevant to the energy assessment of buildings, anonymize them if necessary and systematically evaluate them. This creates a sound database for local authorities, municipal utilities and planners to plan measures such as district heating networks or energy refurbishments precisely and economically.
The focus is on improving the availability and quality of building energy information. This also benefits owners, who receive tools to assess and optimize their energy consumption, while municipalities can use realistic energy demand forecasts at regional level. This data enables the planning of energy-efficient, climate-friendly measures and contributes to the achievement of climate targets.


Project goals
Reducing the effort and improving the accuracy of automatic estimates of building energy demand
Linking of building planning data in a geodata model that can be used by energy planners
Providing this information in a useful format for local authorities, planners and private homeowners
Expansion of the best existing open data and data models on building energy requirements and contributions to open source projects in the field of building energy


The technological solution
- Data collected from various sources
Machine learning models and energy demand simulations coordinated by our project partners
the results for the three user groups in comprehensible formats

Advantages for customers
- Local authorities receive better information for planning their district heating networks
- Homeowners are motivated and empowered to contribute to achieving net zero targets by reducing their energy consumption
- The building energy models can be used by engineers to test different designs
- The building energy models can be adapted to solve other problems, such as thermal risk in buildings

Additional information on the project
We are working on the project together with Fraunhofer IOSB-INA, Sennestadt GmbH, Kreise Lippe and Reich + Hölscher TGA-Planer GmbH.
TransParEnergy is one of 22 research projects selected in the Energie.IN.NRW innovation competition organized by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Industry, Climate Protection and Energy of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia as part of the joint ERDF/JTF funding from the EU and the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. An investment volume of around 4.2 billion euros is available for forward-looking, sustainable and innovative projects in the ERDF/JTF program 2021-2027 in North Rhine-Westphalia. It is made up of 1.9 billion euros in EU funding from the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Just Transition Fund (JTF) as well as co-financing from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the projects' own contributions.


Lea Hemetsberger
Offer management and sales