Ines Lindmeier is Project Manager at the Wien Energie GmbH in the Department of Energy (Heating and Cooling) Services. Her responsibilities include developing and managing innovative projects, dealing with the digital transformation of the substations and the maintenance of the district heating network in Vienna, including strategies on data management and data science solutions.
Before her start at the Wien Energie in 2017, Ines was working in the applied research sector on analytics and simulations of buildings and HVAC systems.
She has graduated in 2006 as Engineer in Building Technology and Management and has a Master’s degree in Energy and Environmental Management – both from the University of Applied Sciences Burgenland.

Abstract:

The district heating network of Vienna is a historically grown (and still growing) system since 1969 and has more than 1200 piping kilometres and more than 10.000 substations. That is the main reason why nearly 75% of the substations work as “stand-alone” solutions with no continuous real-time data connection. Due to this problem in August 2018 a pilot project was started which deals with the testing of IoT- and data science solutions to make the Viennese district heating network ready for digital maintenance solutions and the implementation of the renewable energy system by optimizing the system temperatures and control parameters.

Therefore in two testbeds (each 10MW installed capacity) the potential of condition monitoring and IoT-solutions (different sensors and wireless technologies such as LoRa-Wan, NB-IoT and sigfox) were tested. Additionally, the historical data of 130 substations were used to train supervised machine learning models for predictive maintenance.

The presentation will give an honest insight on the ups and downs during this pilot, according to data acquisition, data exploration, hardware tests, energy efficiency and other obstacles and learnings on the way to innovation.