Power and Energy Webinar Series – The importance of digital tools for the decarbonization of energy buildings
The 19th “Power and Energy Webinar Series” will be organized on Thursday, December 7, at 11 AM (GMT), under the motto “The importance of digital tools for the decarbonization of energy buildings”.
Isabel Azevedo, Head of the Energy Unit at INEGI, and Tiago Soares, Researcher at INESC TEC Centre for Power and Energy Systems (CPES), will be responsible for leading this webinar. Zenaida Mourão, Researcher at INESC TEC Centre for Power and Energy Systems (CPES), will be in charge of the moderation.
People interested in participating in the session, kindly register on the initiative's website: https://energywebinars.inesctec.pt/. Once you complete the form available under the "participate" section on the website, you will receive an email from the organization closer to the session date, containing your access credentials.
About the presentations:
1- Building occupants as active participants in the energy transition – Importance of monitoring and visualization
Citizens are expected to take a central role in the energy transition, actively contributing to the necessary changes in the energy system. Within the building sector, the individual actions are key for the achievement of efficient and healthy buildings. This presentation will show how monitoring and visualization of energy use and IEQ can support and motivate citizens in taking actions and contributing to carbon neutrality. The session will focus mostly on the results from two R&D projects (NUDGE and Asprela+Sustentável).
2-Overcoming Data Scarcity in Load Forecasting: A Transfer Learning Approach for Commercial Buildings
Load forecasting is an asset for sustainable building energy management, as accurate predictions enable efficient energy consumption and contribute to decarbonisation efforts. However, data-driven models are often limited by dataset length and quality. This presentation will show the potential of Transfer Learning for load forecasting in office buildings, with the aim of addressing data scarcity issues and improving forecasting accuracy. The case is based on INESC TEC headquarters building data, consisting of a group of eight virtual buildings. One of the virtual buildings serves as pre-trained base model to transfer knowledge to the remaining virtual buildings, which are analysed in varying degrees of data availability. The results indicate that transfer learning can significantly reduce training time, while maintaining accuracy levels comparable to those of models trained with full dataset and exhibiting superior performance when compared to models trained with scarce data.
About the speakers:
Isabel Azevedo, Head of the Energy Unit at INEGI
Isabel Azevedo is a senior researcher in Sustainable Energy Systems and Head of the Energy Unit at INEGI. She has been working in energy and energy planning related topics for the last 15 years, both in the academic field as well as in more applied projects. Isabel Azevedo has a degree in Physics/Applied Mathematics from the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto and a PhD in Sustainable Energy Systems from the Faculty of Engineering from the University of Porto.
Tiago Soares, Researcher at INESC TEC (CPES)
Tiago Soares received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the School of Engineering of Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Porto, Portugal (ISEP) in 2013 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) in 2017. He is currently a Researcher at INESC TEC and Assistant Guest Professor at the ISEP/IPP. He is a member of the IEEE, of the Portuguese Engineering Association and of the SMART4GRIDS research group at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF). He has coordinated and been involved in several projects addressing energy markets, distributed generation, energy resources management and optimization, optimization under uncertainty, energy communities, energy efficiency and future power systems. He has also authored and co-authored over 60 articles published in international energy journals and conferences.
About the moderator:
Zenaida Mourão, Researcher at INESC TEC (CPES)
Senior Researcher at the Centre for Energy Systems (CPES) and Invited Professor at FEUP, PhD in chemistry from FCUP, is a specialist in the development of energy system planning models and national, regional and sectoral decarbonisation plans. She has more than 10 years' experience in the field of energy planning and developing energy transition and climate mitigation plans, including strategies compatible with the objectives of the European Green Deal and its transcriptions at national and sectoral level. Before joining INESC TEC in January 2022, she was the coordinator of INEGI's Energy Unit and a senior researcher in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Cambridge.
Please do not hesitate to contact us in case of any doubts: energywebinars@inesctec.pt