20 participants attended the four day CTC/Einstein course on thermal energy auditing from various industrial and academic sectors in Ireland. The course was held on May 9th – 12th in the National Maritime College of Ireland (NMCI), Ringaskiddy, Co. Cork, with a supplementary day in November 2011.

This course is based on freely-available, open-source software, EINSTEIN2, developed by an international consortium under the European Commission’s Intelligent Energy Programme.

Following an introductory day tutored by Dermot Cunningham and Eileen O’Leary from CTC, Bettina Muster and Jürgen Fluch from AEE Institute for Sustainable Technologies in Austria presented on the details of the software and associated methodology.

CTC are testing the software in four Irish SMEs: two fish processing factories, a dairy and an ice-cream producer and, in parallel, course participants will now practice using the software on their own applications before returning for an advanced course in the Autumn.

EINSTEIN II BACKGROUND
Industrial thermal energy demand, i.e. requirements for heating and cooling, constitutes 28 % of the total EU final energy demand and produces about 21 % of all CO2 emissions. Space heating and cooling in buildings contributes another 27 % to the final energy demand. Despite improvements in energy efficiency across Europe in recent decades, there remains a large unexploited potential for reducing energy demand through the intelligent combination of existing solutions and technologies. However, the required investments are frequently not made due to, for example, lack of knowledge and limited resources available for energy auditing.
The EINSTEIN II project, under the Intelligent Energy Europe (IEE) programme, uses a holistic integral approach, looking at demand reduction by heat recovery and process integration, and by an intelligent combination of existing affordable heat and cold supply technologies. The project builds on the EINSTEIN tool kit for thermal energy auditing that has been developed within the previous IEE project EINSTEIN (www.iee-einstein.org). This tool kit, based on an expert system software tool, guides the user through the whole procedure from auditing (preparation of visit and data acquisition), to data processing, to the design and technical and economic evaluation of alternative solutions.

AVAILABLE NOW
EINSTEIN thermal auditing guide – see www.einstein-energy.net and more information on the project.

EINSTEIN is a free and open source software project under GPL license – seehttp://sourceforge.net/projects/einstein/files/einstein/EINSTEIN_2.0/