HUME – Hub for Urban Mobility and Renewable Energy

New policies, such as the new ambitious climate goals, will significantly accelerate the sales of electric vehicles and further boost alternative e-mobility solutions such as e-car sharing, e-busses, e-cargo bikes, etc. Providing sufficient collective parking and charging infrastructure for a wide variety of e-mobility services and powered by renewable energy sources will be a huge challenge in our cities. As on-street parking space is further reduced, semi-public hubs will play an important role in the transition.

In the interdisciplinary cooperative project ‘Hub for Urban Mobility and Renewable Energy’ (HUME), Blue Corner joins forces with Alfa Technical Installations, Multiobus, Leasinvest Real Estate and Move as well as with VITO, KU Leuven and EnergyVille to investigate fully secured complex microgrids and smart charging strategies. This project, supported by VLAIO, will examine what a smart concept for combined renewable energy and e-mobility hubs for urban environments can look like. The focus will be on the optimized hardware and control architecture for the microgrid electrical system, a data-driven multi-objective smart charging strategy (algorithm), innovative services (combined energy and mobility, ancillary) and the overarching architecture that enables the integration of these elements.

The ultimate aim of the project is to:

• increase the capacity of charging stations in mobility hubs while respecting the current grid capacity
• improve the local use of renewable energy,
• reduce the HVAC energy consumption of the connected buildings,
• reduce the investment cost of  electrical installations for HUME’s, compared to an equivalent non-smart installation,
• achieve additional revenue for building/parking/charging operators through combined or ancillary services.

The project will take 30 months and started on 1 September 2021.