Final statement of the coordinator

After 4 ½ years, in April 2022 the SCORES project has come to an end. The main goals of SCORES are still very relevant in 2022, maybe even more so because globally the awareness of climate change and the ambitions to become less dependent on fossil energy have only increased, while the cost of wind and solar-based energy has come down. This has caused a huge push for renewable energy initiatives including the fast expansion of domestic solar panel instalments. But as more and more renewable electricity becomes available locally, issues like grid congestion and the mismatch between production and demand are becoming even more obvious than when SCORES started, back in 2017. Thus there is still a strong need for affordable hybrid (heat/electricity) local energy storage and conversion solutions in the domestic environment, which is at the core of what the SCORES project is about.

The demonstrator technologies and prototypes developed in the first years of SCORES were installed on two demo sites, one building in France, and one building in Austria. A dedicated building energy management system was realized on both sites, programmed with the objective to optimize the total energy self-consumption of the buildings. Additionally, a software model has been developed that was used to assess future full-scale hybrid energy systems, with encouraging results.

Sadly the project was greatly hindered in its commissioning phase, early 2020, when the global COVID pandemic struck and working on location was impossible. Although the project could not complete its full testing program, a lot of experience with the development and integration of hybrid energy systems could be gained and disseminated in workshops and training sessions. It was shown that the implementation of the equipment has led to significant energy and financial savings already, even with less than a complete system. One domestic heat storage technology was particularly successful, leading to a spin-off company that is currently commercializing this solution.

The videos of the training sessions, the final video and other events of the Scores project can be revisited on our project page.

The project has ended, but we are far from finished! We encourage interested parties to contact our consortium partners for further development and commercialization of the technologies. Because the sustainable energy revolution will only succeed if we work on hybrid energy solutions, together!

Dr. Erwin Giling