How to optimalise energy demand in blocks-of-buildings (BoB) like e.g. university campuses, business parks, hospital areas?  A BoB has multiple buildings, offering enhanced opportunities to achieve optimilisation because of the different opportunities that these buildings offer to shift demand, generate and store energy. This is the idea behind DR BoB and apart from the contribution DR at BoBs can offer for grid stability, it also offers opportunities to achieve local optimalisation in terms of financial savings, CO2 reduction, or an increase in the consumption of self-generated energy.

The challenge in the DR BoB project was to combine different already existing technologies in such a manner that they would enable DR in a specific context. In four different contexts the solution has been demonstrated: a Teesside University Campus (UK), the technical university of Cluj Napoca (Romania), a business park in Anglet (France) and the hospital Poliambulanza in Brescia (Italy).

DuneWorks was involved in order to address end-user issues and to perform a qualitative evaluation of the demonstration processes at all four sites (based on field work, interviews, surveys etc). An important lesson is that we should move away from the explicit focus on technological readiness levels only, because that is not sufficient to achieve succesfull implementation. Equally important are market readiness, and organisational readiness.

At the Sustainable Places Conference 2019 in Cagliari, Italy, Sylvia presented the findings of the qualitative evaluation. The short conference paper can be accessed here, and the presentation here.