Interview with Pierre Bernaud

  1. Tell us about CEA. What is your core business and role within the project?

CEA is the French Atomic and Alternative Energy Commission, a leading European RTO with over 16,000 employees and 10 centers in France. Part of CEA Tech division, the CEA LITEN (Laboratory of Innovation for New Energy Technologies and Nanomaterials) is located at CEA-INES (French institute of solar energy) in Chambéry, where CEA has employed more than 400 people since 2005.  Within LITEN, Solar Technologies Department (DTS) is dedicated to solar energy and energy efficiency in buildings. In iBECOME, CEA will be in charge of innovative energy services deployment on demonstration office building based in Grenoble, in French Alpes. The team will also bring support for the development of these innovative energy services.

  1. Why did your organisation get involved in the iBECOME project? How does this activity fit with the normal business of your organisation?

CEA team got involved in iBECOME to bring its strong experience in demonstrating innovative technologies impact on real buildings, its strong competency in building monitoring, management and systems integration in a global approach. CEA normal business focuses on pushing innovations onto energy management market by developing technologies/algorithms and validating them at real scale.

  1. How will the outputs of the iBECOME project help drive the sustainability agenda?

The main objective and outputs of iBECOME project is to develop and implement innovative energy services. These energy services will then be integrated to the virtual Building Management System in order to help office building stakeholders (energy managers, tenants, occupants) to reach energy gains objectives without reducing comfort level. CEA team will support the development and will be in charge of one of the validation sites.

  1. What are the technical challenges your work in iBECOME is trying to overcome ?

Inside iBECOME, CEA team will first try to define a data exploitation plan on existing monitored buildings in order to develop and train innovative techniques for Predictive maintenance routines and fault detection algorithm. A second major task will consist in deploying and testing new energy services on building demonstrator, starting with BMS architecture audit and new vBMS integration. Finally CEA will take part in the evaluation of the energy/comfort performance of these innovative energy services

  1. What positive impacts will the projects have when complete?

Pushing forward building systems standardisation and inter-operability and put on market innovative services dedicated to energy gains, occupants comfort and building maintenance are very strong expected outcomes of iBECOME. An other positive expected impact of the project is to facilitate new energy services integration in existing buildings in order to help stakeholders to reach the CO2 emission reduction objectives

Find out more about CEA: https://www.cea.fr/