Professors Mir Mostafavi and Erik Poirier have developed a digital twin to help manage and circularize energy. Read a summary of their work.
Summary
In the face of population growth and rising energy demand, the efficient management of energy resources has become a major challenge. The digital twin, as an emerging solution, is one of the most promising ways of effectively managing, monitoring, simulating and forecasting complex energy ecosystems. The digital twin can serve as an integrated management system for all energy sources (e.g. waste, wind, water, etc.) and be a pillar of the circular economy by “closing the loop” and allocating energy from the right source to the right consumer, at the right time and in the right place. The overall objective of this project is to set up an interdisciplinary team to establish the scientific and technical foundations for the design and development of a digital energy twin for the Quebec City region. The specific objectives of the project are to 1) identify the main components of the digital energy twin and the potential spatio-temporal analyses by considering the available datasets, 2) identify functionalities enabling the analysis of interactions between different multi-source energy layers with a focus on the circularity of energy sources and 3) design scenario capabilities for the allocation of locally produced energy to local consumers in order to optimize energy consumption and enable circularity in the field. This project is a collaboration between the research teams of Professor Mostafavi of Université Laval, Professor Poirier of ÉTS and Dr. Moeini of Hydro-Québec.
