Digital Networking of Buildings, Energy Supply Systems and Users
How can data from fitness apps, smart heaters or intelligent thermostats help to reduce energy consumption in buildings? Prof. Dr. Rita Streblow deals with this and other questions. The engineer has been a professor at the Technical University of Berlin and the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF) for "Digital Networking of Buildings, Energy Supply Systems and Users" since late December. Rita Streblow shares the professorship with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Joachim Seifert.
"In my research, I want to investigate how we can bring together data that accumulates in everyday life in a meaningful way and make it available to all those involved," she says. She wants to develop individual solutions - depending on the needs and requirements of the users. "So far, we have been designing systems according to standard values and static operating points. But we have to take into account the system dynamics and system flexibility in order to create a stable operation of the energy system with renewable energies without restrictions for comfortable interiors," says Rita Streblow. She attaches great importance to data protection and data security. "Among others, we work together with Prof. Dr. Max von Grafenstein from the ECDF, who is a lawyer who deals with data protection law and digital sovereignty," she reports. Both structural and technical measures can be considered to reduce energy consumption in the building sector. "In the networked energy system, it is important to reconcile the locally optimal solutions for the individual users and the building with the global considerations of the national climate protection goals," she says.
Rita Streblow has been researching and working on the topics of user comfort, optimal building energy and decentralized urban energy supply concepts using sector coupling and the necessary communication structures since 2013. After her studies of building services engineering she was a research assistant at the Hermann Rietschel Institute for Heating and Air Conditioning Technology at the TU Berlin. Since 2007 she is senior engineer at the Chair of Building and Air Conditioning Technology at the RWTH Aachen University.
In 2013 she spent a research stay at the AIST in Japan, where she focused on the optimization of building energy systems and energy management systems. Currently, she is heading the interdisciplinary Urban Energy Lab 4.0 project at RWTH Aachen University, where a flexible test field for controllable experiments ranging from the supply of a room to the energetic consideration of an urban district is being developed.
"With my work, I would like to gain further knowledge in the field of digitalized society for my field of building energy technology, process it in a structured way, help shape the process of change and provide practical support," she says.
Rita Streblow is looking forward to the exchange with her colleagues at the ECDF on the topics of data protection, data security, artificial intelligence and the automated evaluation of data.