How can cities plan for gas-free heating when the data needed to make good decisions is sensitive, fragmented or difficult to share?
That question is at the heart of Sharing the Warmth, data sharing for urban heat transition planning, a new research project funded through the NWO-KIC call Data sharing for the energy transition: sociotechnical challenges. The project is led by Wageningen University & Research, with CWI as one of the co-applicants.
Fair and safe data sharing
The project brings together citizens, municipalities, grid operators, companies and researchers to explore how data can be shared safely and in a way that creates trust. This is especially urgent for the heat transition. Municipalities need reliable information to plan heating upgrades efficiently, while households and other local energy users need confidence that their data will be handled carefully and that data sharing also benefits them.
Within the project, CWI will contribute expertise on incentives for fair, safe and trustworthy data sharing. “For instance, households may need to share consumption data to help design new decarbonized heating solutions, but this has to happen in a privacy-preserving way,” says professor Valentin Robu from CWI's Intelligent and Autonomous Systems group and Eindhoven University of Technology. “It is important that data sharing is not only useful for network operators, but that the benefits for households and prosumers are made clear as well.”
By developing privacy-preserving tools and fair data-sharing arrangements, Sharing the Warmth aims to strengthen cooperation between local stakeholders and support better-informed decisions. The long-term goal is to help Dutch cities move towards affordable, sustainable and gas-free heating systems.
Energy transition
The project is part of a broader NWO-KIC programme that supports research on data sharing for the energy transition. In total, four projects have been awarded funding through this call. Together, they will receive 5.7 million euros from NWO and more than eight million euros including co-funding.
Partners
Sharing the Warmth is led by Tarek Alskaif at Wageningen University & Research. Co-applicants are Pedro P. Vergara from TU Delft, Valentin Robu from CWI and Eindhoven University of Technology, Xiao Peng from HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, and Robert Goedegebure from HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht.
The consortium also includes municipalities, grid operators, companies and public partners.
