Smart alsb for energyville

Contributing to the electricity facilities of a laboratory that conducts research on energy systems. That is a bit like building a football field in Cristiano Ronaldo’s garden. Or to program an operating system for Bill Gates. And yet that is precisely what we did for EnergyVille in the Genk Thor science park. Senior project manager Gunther Bleux and sales and marketing director Koen Pellaers tell us more about this.

EnergyVille is a collaboration between the Flemish research partners KU Leuven, VITO, imec and UHasselt, to conduct research into sustainable energy and intelligent energy systems. An example is the smart grids and advanced heating networks. But even all that high-technology research requires electricity.

We built the distribution panels for the new EnergyVille Research Centre. The building is fully energy-neutral, and among other things, houses a battery laboratory, a thermotechnical laboratory and a photovoltaic test field of 300 square metres on the roof.

Gunther: “We were responsible for providing power supply within the building. As commissioned by Vanderhoydoncks in Alken, part of the VMA cluster. They were responsible for the entire installation, while we made all the necessary panels. This is exactly what they were looking for: one partner who would design and build all the panels, including the panels for the charging stations of the building. We engineered and built a large general low-voltage panel with a total of three inputs of 1,200 A, 26 distribution panels for the offices, laboratories and parking … and one single panel for the charging stations.”

Gunther: “The ALSB (Low Voltage Distribution Panel) is indeed a smart panel: there are measurement units for every room. This makes it perfectly possible to monitor the consumption in each room. In order thereby to establish which departments are the smallest and largest consumers. Thus the end user can carry out targeted analyses. And link that information into a wider power management story.”

Koen: “This realisation also eliminates a typical misunderstanding: Okken is not always automatically more expensive than Prisma. Our first proposal was in Prisma. But what happened? The designs were found to be too large – the panels would not fit in the room. With Okken, we could go much smaller. And we also succeeded in presenting a better solution from the technical and commercial point of view. Thus the end result is more compact and offers a better operating guarantee.”