Digitalizing an electrically self-sufficient social dwelling of Spain

Abstract

The urgent climate situation resulting from the indiscriminate consumption of fossil fuels together with the current geopolitical instability has prompted a series of policies in Europe to boost the energy transition through the large-scale installation of renewable energy sources (RES). To combat the intermittency and fluctuations associated with their operation, renewable hydrogen is presented as a versatile solution to decarbonize different economic sectors. Hence, the design and implementation of a hybrid renewable-hydrogen power system has turn out in the first electrically self-sufficient social housing of Spain installed in the town of Novales (Cantabria, Spain). The entire process is automated and controlled by a programmable logic controller (PLC) and monitored by a SCADA system. Under this framework, the HY2RES project proposes a digital twin (DT) modeling of the pilot plant to optimize the control system and the operating parameters thanks to the application of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to the data collected. The paper shows some initial results of the proposed DT, which features the electrical components of the physical system. The obtained results both validate the proposed methodology and evince the possibilities brought by it.