Mission & Focus

Our mission is to collaboratively develop feasible automation approaches to foster sustainable urban energy systems. This research group focuses on increasing the efficiency, sustainability and flexibility of urban energy systems by leveraging data, sufficiency and user-centric approaches to create societal benefit, support industry innovation and contribute to scientific advancement. 

Key Research Topics

Our main areas of research include:

• User centric coordination and automation

  • The energy transition started a shift in power generation from big plants to small rooftops. Beyond the production aspect, matching energy demand with it has become more relevant. A way to identify and utilize demand side flexibility is understanding where energy demand comes from, how energy end users interact with energy systems and how their understanding affects the overall system. 

• Decentral decisions

  • Our research projects focus on technology, building and district level interactions. As a joint, aligned or coordinated operation of individual components can have benefits for the overall system, but raises challenges along information propagation, fairness, and grid constraints, investigating decentral decision making leads to insightful solutions to applied problems. 

• Management of multi-energy carrier interactions  

  • At its heart, sector coupling allows for combining the strengths of very different technologies across energy, industry and societal sectors, if coordinated correctly. Seeing the needs of different stakeholders at different points in time and space, coupling sectors and contributing sustainable pathways to meet these needs, is one of our group's core research areas. 

Selected research projects

Our group is actively involved in the following projects:

• SNSF NCCR Automation -  At the core of our research is the development of new automation methods, designed with awareness of their potential social implications, and the application of these methods to energy, and other areas.  We address the challenges arising from the ongoing energy transition. As power generation becomes ever more decentralised and complex, with consumers becoming prosumers through photovoltaic installations, and incorporates a growing proportion of renewable energy sources, there is an urgent need for automation solutions to coordinate supply and demand, ensuring reliable supply despite the increased uncertainty and complexity in the system. 
• SWEET Lantern - The SWEET Lantern WP4 aims at better understanding of the changing roles of energy users and their impact on local digitalized energy systems. It starts from an assumption of socio-technical interplay and multi-scale interconnection (building, district, city).  It generates and share information and data impacting on the energy system, with a special focus on social norms and technological opportunities for operational efficiency and flexibility. 
• SWEET PATHFNDR - PATHFNDR is a research project sponsored by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy’s “SWEET” programme (Call 1-2020) and hosted by ETH Zurich. The project consortium is represented by eight research partners – ETH Zurich, Empa, PSI, ZHAW, HSLU, UNIGE, EPFL and TU Delft – and 25 cooperation partners. The project aims to develop and analyze transition pathways for renewable energy integration in Switzerland. The project will deliver feasible pathways, provide planning and operation tools, develop pilot and demonstration projects, identify new business opportunities and innovation strategies, and analyze potential policies. 
• GOES-CH – Geothermal based optimized energy systems - The use of fossil fuels for heating causes a significant share of global CO2 emissions. Geothermal energy can significantly substitute fossil fuels and aid in district cooling, resilience, and load shifting. However, system integration and scalability are currently limited. Therefore, we propose a platform-based, standardized and transferable approach covering all scales from subsurface analysis to district design and city-scale potential assessment. The development of platform-based design and operation frameworks is key to the cost-effective, wide and rapid deployment of renewable technologies with optimal integration of geothermal energy and other carbon-free resources at all scales. Specifically for Switzerland, we will integrate high-temperature borehole storage in the energy hub of the Campus Dübendorf to maximize the impact. At this Forschungscampus, we will demonstrate and validate our framework and the new storage system. Results will be reincorporated into the framework for wide deployment and technology scaling