Paris-Saclay is a development project launched in 2009 and is one of the largest in Europe covering a territory representing a living area for 650,000 inhabitants spread across 27 municipalities. The main aim of this project is to establish an urban centre for scientific and industrial excellence to strengthen the French economy. This centre includes universities, industrial R&D centres, offices for SMEs, and residential real estate to provide housing for people working in the area.
The heat supply for the entire urban centre is provided by a local district heating network powered by deep geothermal energy. The network is managed by EPAPS (The Public Planning Establishment of Paris-Saclay) and operated by Idex.
It is a low-temperature network (30°C) where heat pumps are used to increase temperature levels to be delivered to the customers (60°C). However, during peak times when outdoor temperatures drop, significantly higher temperatures (>90°C) are required to ensure proper thermal comfort for the building occupants. The network operator Idex uses natural gas backup boilers to fulfil the peak heat load resulting in massive energy supply costs due to the high gas prices. This is the biggest challenge that the operators are facing today.
As part of the Interreg D2Grids project, VITO/EnergyVille has been helping EPAPS and Idex in solving the challenges they face through peak demand management thanks to the STORM controller. Since November 2021, STORM has been operational on the network in Paris-Saclay controlling 3 large residential buildings used by the students at the university in the urban centre. These buildings combined represent about 25% of the total heat load, thereby offering large amount of thermal flexibility to the STORM peak management system.
The STORM Controller has been operating autonomously and shaving peaks for the customer every day, bringing huge value in total operating cost savings and reduced CO2 emissions benefiting not only the network operators but society as a whole. VITO and EPAPS will continue to operate the controller going into the next heating season and generate even more value from the heat network.
