his project will explore the benefits of 'Smart' buildings in heavily utilised City Centres with Glasgow City Council (GCC) who share the aspiration for a future 'Smart' grid to help reduce the City's carbon footprint from the anticipated adoption of a wide range of low carbon technologies. The project will take advantage of funding from the TSB future city project managed by GCC which will pay for all Communication and Data management systems to ensure a potential for legacy system. This project will be achieved through a dual approach.

1. Modelling current and future city centre energy infrastructure with a range of low carbon scenarios with relevant smart grid interventions applied. Scenarios will include: building energy efficiency improvements; penetration of distributed generation(DG) new electrical transport loads; and different options for building heating and cooling through heat pumps and CHP. This will include modelling on the impact of Demand Side Response and its potential use in supporting a range of network issues.

2. Demonstration of the feasibility and cost saving potential of Demand Side Response (DSR) interventions deployed in the buildings of a variety of GCC buildings. By establishing the levels of base and peak load reduction that can be realised through DSR installed retrospectively in a number of the City's public and office buildings, the use of DSR as a cost-effective tool to support the rollout of low-carbon technologies and the load growth they represent can be assessed against traditional reinforcement.

Objectives

Key outcome will be the:

1. Development of a City centre network model where cost and impact of smart grid interventions can be assesed. Physical DSR interventions will complement the modelling by:

2. Gaining experience in the application of DSR measures to City Centre building stock;

3. Achieving measurable results to peak load reduction;

4. Understanding and quantifying the role DSR could play in cost-benefit analysis of future reinforcement;

5. Understanding the resource DSR may represent in terms of ancillary services to the network;

6. Integrating the use and monitoring of DSR into our systems. The net result for customers will be a potential increase in low carbon technologies that can be deployed on the network, without the need for future costly and potentially disruptive grid infrastructure reinforcements.