Just like in other countries, Siemens is pioneering electrification in Italy and has been implementing a series of energy efficiency measures in its own buildings for several years, enabling the company to achieve its ambitious climate targets. The measures taken at Casa Siemens on its way to becoming carbon-neutral have already slashed in half the energy demand of the building complex – down to about 1,100 tonnes of oil equivalents –, and they continue to be driven forward.
The implementation of a smart microgrid at Casa Siemens, Siemens’ Italian headquarters in Milan, has been part of Siemens’ global €100 million decarbonization program that provides for the energy impact reduction of the company’s production plants and buildings.
The microgrid, which is the new energy backbone of the building complex, relies on distributed power generation plus the maximization of self-consumption. At the same time, it reduces the load on the national grid thanks to its ability to precisely manage and balance electrical loads and power generation.With a total capacity of more than 1 MW, it is a concrete example of how various innovative technologies can be combined to sustainably power a huge area – in this specific case 32,000 square meters, the equivalent of almost 4.5 soccer pitches, that accommodate some 1,800 people.
The microgrid at Casa Siemens is monitored and controlled by DEOP, the cloud-based optimization of distributed energy resources. This intuitive and flexible easy-to-use application, which has been developed by Siemens, enables the energy manager to comprehensively supervise all assets connected to the microgrid. It collects the data captured by field devices in the various systems and interfaces with Siemens’ building management system Desigo that in turn manages the various building technology tasks, such as HVAC, lighting, climate, access control, and fire prevention, and generates planning algorithms to optimize energy subsystems and final consumption. In this way, DEOP enables the microgrid to achieve the highest possible levels of efficiency and sustainability.
The implementation of a microgrid at Casa Siemens in 2019 has been the most important step so far. Enabling the building complex to meet its energy demand in a more sustainable way, the microgrid has helped Casa Siemens to reduce its carbon emissions by 50% as early as 2020, and it will make it possible to achieve a net carbon footprint of zero by 2030, in this way contributing to the creation of more caring environments that understand and manage changing conditions and requirements, support the people who use them, and make lives better.
Analyses carried out during the design phase have predicted an average daily electricity demand of 850 kW during winter and 1300 kW in summer, while the maximum total power output of the PV and trigeneration systems is 1,163 kW. This means that the microgrid can largely do without electricity from the grid. Even better, Casa Siemens can even feed 4% of its annual PV output – a whopping 40,000 kWh of clean energy – into the national grid, since the PV systems also run during weekends, when the buildings’ own energy demand is minimal.
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"Casa Siemens" - Siemens’ Italian headquarters in Milan
