The BIGG project (Building Information aGGregation, harmonisation and analytics platform), launched in December 2020, demonstrates the application of big data technologies and data analytic techniques in the complete building’s life cycle, in more than 4.000 buildings in 6 large-scale pilot test beds, 3 in Spain (Catalonia) and 3 in Greece (Athens, Volos and Thessaloniki).

The six business cases considered in the project can be divided in 3 case study areas:

In Catalunya, Spain, BIGG has 3 business cases:

• BC1. Benchmarking and energy efficiency tracking in public buildings,
• BC2. Energy certification in residential and tertiary buildings, and
• BC3. Building life-cycle – From planning to renovation.

The site integrates key actors in the area disposing of large datasets of building energy performance data. The local consortium includes regional energy policy institution, public building management company and building research centre. The pilot site will demonstrate a number of analytic services that address several needs of the public administrations to enhance the data gathering and analysis for monitoring the performance and improving the energy efficiency of the building stock.

• The business cases BC4. Energy Performance Contract-based savings, and
• BC5. Buildings for occupants: Comfort case study 17 large commercial office buildings in Athens, Greece, managed through Energy Performance Contracting (EnPC) or Maintenance Contract.

The pilot site will demonstrate the application of EnPC-based management for commercial buildings. Focus will be on continuously optimising the building operation-consumption, to guarantee comfort of occupants, by controlling HVAC systems/lighting. All buildings have passed Energy Audits (ISO 50001 or ISO14001), offering extensive information about building physical characteristics (GREY), performance and consumption before and after the energy efficiency improvements.

• The business case BC6. Electricity and Gas demand-response consist of 150.000 HERON electricity and natural gas clients (residential and commercial) spread across Volos and Thessaloniki, Greece.

Residential consumers can tune the operation of their heating system through a smartphone application and let the controller optimally adapt the heating operation to their comfort limits, weather conditions and building characteristics. The pilot site will demonstrate the application of Demand Response management on top of electricity and gas consumers of HERON including the gathering and harmonisation of data stored in different databases.

The BIGG project has just published its first White Paper “Validation of the BIGG Data Analytics Toolbox over the BIGG Data Reference Architecture in 6 Business Cases in Spain and Greece”, which is now available online. Throughout this White Paper, the six business cases are introduced, including the main details about each use case. The technical solution proposed is presented, together with some results and the analysis of each solution, with the aim of understand how BIGG has helped with the challenges found.