X Flex

How to boost energy efficiency in a vacation resort?

Tourism is a very important generator of income and employment for European countries, despite the high energy consumption of the resorts and vacation houses due to their special infrastructure (swimming pools, SPA centers, etc.).

This topic will be addressed during the Energy Talk organised by X-FLEX and ebalance-plus projects (funded by the Horizon 2020 programme) ad port of the European Sustainable Energy Week 2021. This session will be online and the date is yet to be confirmed.

This session will be focused on how the energy consumption of these places can be used as an opportunity to offer flexibility to the energy network, optimizing the energy usage all together, reducing the energy bill and CO2 emissions.  Showing how the two holiday resorts of both projects (Albena in Bulgaria and Novasol in Denmark) use their special conditions to provide energy flexibility from their local networks to the distribution grid, to increase their reliability and efficiency.

The main goal of this session is to increase awareness about the potential to use the infrastructure in holiday resorts to benefit the power system, which has long been unjustly ignored in discussions on energy flexibility in buildings. This energy talk could help the two projects to get connected to more organizations, researchers, and companies interested to discuss this potential. Our energy talk can be the start of further discussions, events, and workshops related to this important topic.

The EU Sustainable Energy Week 2021 (EUSEW), organised by CINEA – European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency, will take place on 25-29 October 2021 under the theme: ‘Towards 2030: Reshaping the European Energy System.

Albena pilot site of X-FLEX

Albena, Bulgaria, is an area on the Black Sea coast, which consists entirely of hotel resorts whose main purpose is to provide hospitality services to guests. Its most active season is during the summer when it can accommodate up to 20,000 people. On-site, there are 43 hotels, 25 restaurants, bars, swimming pools, an aqua park, and many more. Altogether, along with the electrical and water grids, communications, and street infrastructure, are owned by Albena AD.

In Albena, XFLEX solutions will increase the reliability of energy monitoring and grid resilience and create flexible market mechanisms with the provision of a model for financial incentives as a motivation for future flexibility efforts and collaborations. Being a predominantly summer resort, Albena is subject to a fluctuating energy demand throughout the year. X-FLEX solutions are further expected to utilise this seasonal difference and improve energy consumption and efficiency.

Jutland pilot site of ebalance-plus

For this demonstration site, 15 summer houses located in Jutland (Denmark) with an annual power consumption of about 30.000 kWh per house have been selected.  All the selected summer houses have swimming pools. Although the houses are not occupied throughout the year, they have a base heating load over the whole year to keep the pool water temperature, during unoccupied periods, above a minimum value, in order to allow customers to rent the house also with short notice. These swimming pools can be used as thermal storage to provide flexibility to the grid. These summer houses are rental accommodation provided for the project by NOVASOL.

Stay tuned for the updates!

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