MTU researchers develop automated energy management platform
A team of researchers at Munster Technological University (MTU) have developed a retrofittable energy management platform that enables energy cost savings of approximately 20% and a similar reduction in CO2 emissions.
Energy management platform, O-PENS (Optimise Predict Energy Saver), is designed to facilitate off-setting of peak load tariffs for commercial, agricultural, and domestic end users and enable energy managers in high energy consuming organisations to meet their carbon emissions and energy cost reduction targets. The system incorporates a real-time pricing structure to enable end users to engage with I-SEM (Integrated Single Electricity Market) pricing.
The O-PENS team plans on spinning out the platform into a start-up company later this year and is currently in talks with potential customers and investors.
O-PENS was developed by Dr Conor Lynch and his research team at MTU’s Nimbus Research Centre. The platform is funded under the Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation fund, a national programme that helps entrepreneurial academics and commercial leaders in Ireland’s research system to commercialise new technologies and inventions. It has been trialled on a number of domestic and commercial sites and has demonstrated significant energy cost and carbon reduction savings for customers.
Dr Lynch said: “Whereas many existing energy management platform systems optimise renewable generators or available energy storage assets for a particular site, O-PENS takes a more holistic approach – developing a grid-connected smart network system encompassing energy market-tracking tariff prediction technologies, used in conjunction with auxiliary battery supply and any customer-own electricity generation assets. It then uses AI and machine learning to deliver customers the quintessential energy schedule to optimise their respective energy requirements based on overall cost or CO2 emissions or indeed a blend of the two, which mutually benefits both the end user and the environment.”
“O-PENS is the result of many years of research by Dr Lynch and his team,” said Ronan Coleman, commercialisation specialist at MTU. “It is very rewarding to see what was originally a concept secure the necessary funding support from Enterprise Ireland to turn this concept into reality. The funding enabled the team to develop a fully functioning product which can have a real impact, both from a commercial and societal perspective.”
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