On Tuesday, June 25, BUILD UP hosted a webinar organised with the SmartUP project on ‘Smart energy transition: from ideal to reality’. The event provided a hands-on perspective to understand what  Smart Readiness Indicators (SRIs)  are and how we can upscale their implementation considering the political, legal and economic factors involved in translating practices from one context to another.

The event started with a presentation by Paris Fokaides, associate professor at the Frederick University Cyprus and a BUILD UP Board of Ambassadors member. Fokaides provided an overview of the SRI legal framework and its role in promoting smart technologies as facilitators for energy and sustainability transitions. ‘SRI is a new scheme to assess the smartness of building, allowing building users to have a good understanding of the performance of the building, while also reducing its energy consumption’, said Fokaides.

Immediately after, Joanne Patterson, professor at Cardiff University, and Emmanouil Perisoglou, lecturer at Cardiff University, delved into the reality of implementing smart systems by sharing a practical example of smart energy systems’ refurbishment in social housing in Wales.  

Knowledge representation for comparing use-cases in SRI implementation

The event ended with a session composed by Anna Badyina, research associate at Cardiff University, and Clarice Bleil de Souza, member of the BUILD UP Board of Ambassadors and professor at Cardiff University. The two experts presented a knowledge representation system, that extracts information from the case studies in a structured way so that the different implemented intelligent systems can be captured and compared in different contexts. ‘Decisions related to building operation services and the levels of smartness associated with them need to be mapped to produce use-cases grounded on what is possible’, concluded Bleil de Souza.