SOLUTION Site Cernier
The community of Cernier in the canton of Neuchâtel in Switzerland is one of four pilot communities within the SOLUTION project. It is a typical Swiss community (most municipalities do not have more than 10 000 inhabitants), which makes it a good national role model and the experiences can be transferred to other Swiss cities of similar size.
SOLUTION’s demonstration site in Cernier consists of 1 new and 6 refurbished buildings, including a nursery school, a primary school, a multi-family house and a farmhouse. The renewable energy systems implemented in Cernier included biogas cogeneration, heat pumps, wood boilers, solar thermal collector and photovoltaic installations. A key development project at Cernier was the construction of an agricultural biogas plant for district heating and cogeneration.
*The KPIs for the new and refurbished buildings are compared with the baseline of a reference building.
Overall a gross floor area of 12 744 m² has been refurbished during the project and 5148 m² have been newly constructed. The final energy consumption, according to monitoring data, has been measured before and after the interventions for all the refurbished buildings on the demo site. The results show that the average value for heating energy consumption exceeds 290 kWh/m²/yr before the retrofitting measures. The planned interventions for retrofitting reduced the total energy consumption for heating to 150 kWh/m²/yr. With regard to the new buildings, the reference value is 45 kWh/m²/yr and 28 kWh/m²/yr for the SOLUTION building.
This represents 1615 MWh/yr of final energy savings. The primary energy savings go up to 2540 MWh/yr while the CO2 reduction amounts to 398 tonnes every year.
Challenges
Country |
Description |
|---|---|
| Switzerland |
The main challenge was motivating people due to the poor financial advantage of the power savings.
|
| Switzerland |
There were difficulties in obtaining long-term contracts with suppliers of co-substrates for biogas cogeneration. |
| Switzerland |
There are heavy administrative requirements with small, individual projects, which unnecessarily reduce the economic interest in the technological solution implemented. |
| Switzerland |
Cernier is too small an area and lacks the human resources to have an energy service, so the responsibility for the energy supply and management is not in the hands of the town’s authorities. |
| Switzerland |
With regard to implementing district heating, there weren't enough consumers to make the project secure and provide a cheaper cost of heating. The density of suitable buildings is not very high, even in the city centre. |
The interventions in Cernier include:
Energy efficiency in buildings
- Building integrated renewable energy sources
- Photovoltaics
- Heat pumps
- Building services (HVAC and lighting)
- Individual reduction of consumption thanks to awareness tools, including access to instantaneous consumption, visit from energy advisor, implementation of saving tools such as those avoiding standby-mode
Energy systems integration
- District heating
- Cogeneration (CHP)
- Construction of an agricultural biogas plant for district heating and cogeneration, which enables treating 7500 tons of organic waste, and feeding 740 MWh/yr of electricity to the grid and about 700 MWh/yr of heat to the district heating. Beyond creating additional revenue for the farmer operating the plant, the facility also allowed for the creation of necessary storage volume for the collected pig manure, as no manure can be brought out to the fields during the winter. These two factors ensure the ongoing continuity of the farm’s operation. The decomposed manure creates a fertiliser that is easier to absorb for the plants and avoids the release of methane into the atmosphere.
- Biomass boiler
- Thermal collectors
- Smart street lighting
The investment cost for the intervention was EUR 2.3 million in total, which includes the costs of methanisation equipment (EUR 1 million), cogeneration (EUR 225 000) and technical building (EUR 275 000). The remuneration for electricity fed to the grid is CHF 0.427/kWh (excl. VAT), based on an average yearly power production of 93 kW el. The payback period is 7 years.
The community’s aims are very ambitious: within five years, Cernier wants to reach energy independence by using 70% of renewable energy for heating and 90% for electricity – whereas at the moment less than 5% of the used energy comes from renewable sources.
- Estimated population involved: 2,000
- Approx. geographical area coverage 911 km2
- Approx. energy saving: 70 %
- Approx. energy from RES: 90 %