Energy rehabilitation of a university building system as a technical response to the Spanish blackout

This work from the AGORA project is framed within the need to increase the local energy autonomy and resilience of buildings to deal with critical events, such as the blackout of the electricity grid in Spain in 2025. It proposes to energetically renovate the heating system of a university building and to quantify the improvement of autonomy in thermoeconomic terms. The proposed system incorporates a hybrid heat pump with photovoltaic and autonomous control, and is evaluated, including the validated model of the building based on monitoring data. Based on the thermoeconomic results, the new system reduces energy consumption from 28,000 to 10,000 kWhex/year, with a renewable contribution of 36%. The average annual unit cost decreases from 807 to 575 c€/kWhex, and CO2 emissions by 54%. These results confirm an improvement in efficiency, sustainability and energy sovereignty compared to the conventional system. The thermoeconomic approach highlights the adaptation of the different qualities of each exergy flow and is applicable to achieve energy sovereignty of buildings, to minimize the dependence on external resources and to favour local consumption. Furthermore, these applications implemented in renewable technologies allow the sustainability of systems to be assessed, contributing to a wider energy transition and climate change mitigation.