Current projects

The project result is a Virtual Reality Digital Twin environment of the test sites "My Smart City Graz" and "TU Graz - Innovation District Inffeld". The user can interactively operate and visualise energy-technical building simulations and Internet of Things monioring data of the districts. This will support all stakeholders in making our cities more climate-neutral, resilient, efficient and liveable.

The project COOL-KIT develops demonstrates and structures system solutions for the cooling of buildings, with a focus on the founders' period (Gründerzeit). Buildings from this period (approx. built 1850 to 1910) characterise the centres of many European cities and contain high-quality public and private functions. Climate change, densification and sealing are increasingly causing extreme summer situations in these central urban locations and are rapidly enhancing the need for overheating protection and active building cooling. Due to the lack of overarching approaches to cool this important group of buildings, the increasing use of inefficient individual cooling systems (mostly single split units) becomes an energy-related, acoustic and architectural burden. The cooling systems developed in the project are based on different cooling sources (ground, air, microgrids) and various active cooling techniques and components (activated intermediate ceilings, fan coils, radiators). Passive approaches such as shading or night ventilation are investigated as complementary measures. Predictive control technology ensures optimal control and the use of PV electricity a sustainable operation. Cooling system and operation designs are developed, taking into account the accessible synergies with the heating operation. Cooling ceilings are used to reduce heating system temperatures to increase the year-round efficiency and reduce district heating requirements. Selected system configurations are implemented in several buildings of the participating universities. Testing of different predictive control approaches will be performed on the test buildings using a digital twin, based on an IoT platform, followed by comprehensive energy and comfort related, economic, ecological and operational evaluations. The experience gained simulation studies, as well as market and stakeholder analyses lead to a modularly structured bundle of interdisciplinarily evaluated system solutions, the COOL-KIT. BIM models of the system concepts also enable subsequent projects to be configured in a technically and economically targeted manner with little processing effort.

This project aims to present development options and potentials for carbon management in Styria, to locate the most important stakeholders along the value chain and to derive future paths and recommendations for action for the Styrian research and development community and for industrial applications.

EDUPED’s aims to accelerate the transition to Positive Energy Districts (PEDs) by systemically applying morphology approaches for urban regeneration and refurbishment. It co-creates PED strategies through 5 living labs in the Netherlands, Spain, Austria, Italy, and Romania; which are selected based on their high potential to integrate diverse perspectives. EDUPED adopts a Research Oriented Approach to achieve tangible and scalable results comprising technical solutions, socio-economic frameworks, governance and regulatory considerations for: a) minimizing energy consumption through deep retrofitting; b) maximizing local RES potentials and flexibility through smart multi-commodity grids; and c) mitigating climate-change effects on higher cooling/heating demands.

Austria is heavily depending on natural gas and oil. Large urban DH networks in Vienna, Graz, Linz, and Salzburg are mainly based on combined heat and power plants (CHP) using natural gas. Other cities, such as Klagenfurt, are still relying on natural gas for covering peak loads. Since the use of renewable fuels and CHP will be very limited in the future, and the connection of more customers to the DH networks can be expected, significant amounts alternative heat sources such as heat pumps, waste heat, solar- and geothermal energy will be required to secure and decarbonize the DH supply. However, this is resulting in various challenges, especially related to the optimization of the building stock in terms of return temperatures and flexibilities, network hydraulics, bi-directional operation, the integration of seasonal storages, as well as consumer involvement and business models – there is very limited experience for existing urban DH networks. Also, the connected investment costs are very high and uncertainties regarding energy prices, availability of alternative heat sources and seasonal storages as well as implementation of retrofitting and optimization activities, leading to high risks. DeRiskDH will develop and demonstrate key enabling solutions on a technological and a strategic level as well as innovative business models towards building owners and end users for handling the technical challenges and minimizing the investment risk in alternative heat sources. Those solutions will be demonstrated and tested: Vienna: innovative control algorithms will be developed and demonstrated in an innovative secondary DH network, including a local waste heat source and bi-directional operation. In Graz, the aim is to reduce the DH network temperatures in order to increase the performance of the heat pump in a new district, with a focus domestic hot water preparation. In Linz, a quick assessment tool for assessing the potential of optimizing the building installations should be developed. Salzburg will perform an assessment of the DH network hydraulics, including cascading for a complete decarbonization strategy. For Klagenfurt the focus is on activating building flexibility measures, P2H and heat pump integration for peak load reduction.

The Grand Challenge ahead is to shift fossil-dominated centralized energy systems towards regenerative integrated multi-vector grids. This requires also sustainable electrical energy storage, including the related raw material supply, processes and systems. A real impact on economy, society and ecology is only created if materials, processes and products can be potentially transferred to large scale. This represents a particular challenge for mid to long term, systems-integrated energy storage, also because the EU strongly depends on critical raw materials from politically instable regions. In VanillaFlow, we develop radically new approaches for integrated energy storage which combine artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) with flow battery technology to replace currently employed, non-sustainable, and critical raw materials (i.e. redox-active molecules, membranes) in flow batteries by readily-available renewable materials based on starch and lignocellulosics. VanillaFlow will use AI and ML techniques such as physics-informed modeling, causal discovery, and representation learning, and makes use of deep learning and symbolic regression. These approaches are used in designing redox active quinones, and to optimize their interplay with the other components of a battery on single and multi-cell level. The whole research will be guided by toxicology investigations to ensure that sustainable and inherently safe materials will be obtained in the project. Today, the innovation capacity of European scientists and industry in the area of renewable materials makes them already the leading global players in the field. VanillaFlow will further support the European technological leadership in the area by cross-fertilization of different fields (artificial intelligence, battery technology, pulp and paper, biotechnology, polymer technology, toxicity) while addressing needs of sustainable materials in mid to long term energy storage.

In the light of the growing pressure to decarbonise our economies, hydrogen is attracting strongly increasing attention from researchers, industry, policy makers and the wider public. Although hydrogen has been described as a promising substitute for fossil fuels already in the 1970s, current enthusiasm about the energy carrier is unprecedented. A rising number of countries are implementing national hydrogen strategies, policies, and policy targets, and large corporations such as Toyota, Bosch, or Siemens present the hydrogen economy as the growth market of the coming decades. In addition, the recent war in the Ukraine strengthens hopes about hydrogen even further. While expectation and attention levels associated with hydrogen are rising, important inconsistencies exist in terms of how the production of hydrogen is envisioned. Casting a glance at already specified national hydrogen strategies shows that nations have very different expectations about the roles that fossil fuels will play in this production process. Germany and the UK are good examples in this regard. Whereas Germany focuses on hydrogen produced from renewable electricity (‘green’ hydrogen), the UK strategy places an additional emphasis on the production of hydrogen from natural gas that is combined with technological approaches that capture and store the resulting CO2 emissions (so-called ‘blue’ hydrogen). In the HydroFRAME project, the examples of Germany and the UK are used to better understand the processes by which nations develop desirable visions of sociotechnical futures. Conceptualizing the future images associated with the German and British hydrogen strategies as politically legitimized ‘imaginaries’, the following questions will be addressed: - What expectations and visions are associated with the emerging hydrogen imaginaries in Germany and the UK, and which framing processes in the policy arena have driven the formation of these imaginaries? - Which alternative or competing hydrogen visions exist in these countries, and what are the country-specific differences? - Which narratives are associated with the countries’ ‘incumbent’ natural gas imaginaries, and how do these narratives relate to the emerging hydrogen imaginaries? - How did the public framing of hydrogen futures in Germany and the UK evolve over time, and what has been the role of these framing processes in shaping the emerging hydrogen imaginaries? By shedding light on how the emerging future images associated with the German and British hydrogen strategies relate to discursive processes, the project gains important insight into the interplay between two different types of expectations: institutionally stabilised, and politically legitimized, expectations on the one hand, and expectations that are shared rhetorically through ‘language in use’ on the other. Furthermore, the project provides a decision basis for countries and regions that currently think about their own hydrogen futures.

Against the background of the necessity to create a sustainable mobility system, different mobility paths for the next decades will be developed and evaluated in this project. For this purpose, an interdisciplinary supported, multidimensional view on the future development of mobility in Styria will be taken, which considers both passenger and freight transport as well as implications for Styria as a production location. The future projections should be flexible enough to integrate recent materializing developments, to strengthen appropriate trends and to change course according to the principle of avoid-shift-improve. The projection period covers the next 20 years in line with the 2040 climate neutrality target at the federal level. The analysis will seek to answer the following specific questions, among others: - What new governance structures and tax needs are derived for spatial, urban, and transportation planning? - What are the requirements for the distribution patterns of housing, workplaces and infrastructure? - How do the different projections affect social inclusion and socio-spatial inequalities? - What is the significance of new social practices, such as the use of "Mobility as a Service" (MaaS) offerings, for the Styrian industry? The project approaches this issue through a broad-based, transdisciplinary backcasting process. With the participation of stakeholders, the neuralgic points of possible development paths are identified and quantitative projection calculations are validated. In addition, this project combines backcasting and scenario analysis in a contrasting and synthesizing way (a methodological approach that is quite innovative in international comparison).

Although there seems to be broad support for a transformation to a hydrogen-based economy, there are different expectations regarding the implementation and design of such an economy. For instance, hydrogen is often seen as an environmentally friendly substitute for fossil fuels, allowing us to maintain our current (globalized) consumption and production patterns in the future. However, hydrogen is also often associated with energy independence from nation states and individual regions. Finally, there are visions that associate a future hydrogen economy with a democratization of the energy system as well as with an establishment of decentralized post-growth societies. There are also different expectations with regard to the production of hydrogen. For example, while some countries focus exclusively on green hydrogen in their hydrogen strategies (i.e. hydrogen produced by electrolysis and renewable electricity), other countries push the production of hydrogen from fossil fuels in combination with carbon (dioxide) capture (blue or turquoise hydrogen). Against this background, this project explores the opportunities available to the Styrian region in terms of increased hydrogen use (and associated R&D&I activities). As in basically all processes of socio-technical change, different logics - and thus different visions of the future - come together in the use of hydrogen. The aim of this project is to map them systematically and to confront them critically with considerations of feasibility. The central result is therefore the description and evaluation of potential future paths for the Styrian region as well as the comparison of these with current R&D&I activities and with developments in the larger context (Austria, EU, global). The results of this research project can subsequently be used as a basis for the continuous design of a Styrian future strategy in the field of hydrogen. Specifically, the following questions will be addressed: - Which different hydrogen visions are discussed in the Styrian context and how are these visions evaluated by experts and stakeholders? - What are the opportunities and risks for those private-sector actors who are to drive this transformation forward? - What socioeconomic effects can be expected? - Which synergies between potential future paths in the field of hydrogen and other Styrian R&D&I activities (in related topics) can be identified? To answer these questions, possible hydrogen future paths for Styria are formulated based on (i) focus groups with stakeholders, (ii) a systematic literature loyalty analysis, and (iii) an analysis of public discourses. Afterwards, these future paths will be critically discussed and evaluated in an exchange with experts and stakeholders. For this purpose, multi-criteria analyses will be performed and causal loop diagrams will be developed. The multi-criteria analyses are based on the Multicriteria Mapping (MCM) approach, which makes it possible to include a variety of relevant perspectives and to systematically illuminate competing views. The causal loop diagrams are based on systems mapping approaches and allow to embed the respective development paths into economic questions.

The provision of scientific knowledge is of great importance for social decision-making processes. The challenge here is to make data and facts on pressing social issues available to citizens and politicians. A technology assessment will examine new ways of evaluating and analyzing personal information using artificial intelligence while fully respecting the right to privacy can be carried out in a socially acceptable manner

The aim of the proposed study on the technology assessment of artificial intelligence (TA study) is to assess the socio-economic potential of AI-based recommender systems. In particular, opportunities for regional value creation and sustainable development are to be discussed. The results of the TA study provide a basis for software developers and political decision-makers alike. Recommender systems support economic decisions by providing information on selected products and services. This mediation service is all the more useful the more confusing the offer is and the better the selection provided can be tailored to the individual needs and preferences of the information seeker. At the same time, the use of AI-supported recommender systems raises important questions of fairness. What criteria are used to evaluate the actors and offers involved and does the provision of recommendations lead to unintentional discrimination against individual interest groups? As Snoboli et al. (2022) argue, the definition of fairness itself is a multi-stakeholder problem that must be negotiated between the groups involved. The proposed TA study takes up this problem and explains it on the basis of a concrete AI development. The results of the proposed study will be incorporated into the development of recommendations for AI-based recommender systems. These recommendations will be communicated to software developers in the form of design guidelines and made available to policy makers in the form of policy briefs.

The Styria 2030+ walking strategy forms the foundation for the expansion of active mobility in Styria. The province of Styria is thus laying the foundation for the design of pedestrian-friendly public spaces in order to increase the number of journeys made on foot. In a one-year pilot phase, the Styrian municipalities are called upon to to plan and ultimately implement concrete measures based on the strategy. The pilot phase for planning and implementing initial measures in the Styrian municipalities is being scientifically supported by the STS Unit at TU Graz. Transcripts, recordings and other materials from the planned "pedestrian traffic tables" as well as interviews with the participating municipalities will be used for a qualitative study. A final report will summarize the findings from the pilot phase and recommendations for action for the province of Styria will be derived. The aim of the project is to accompany the implementation process of the Styria 2030+ walking strategy in the Styrian municipalities, to document and analyze it. The results from the report facilitate the further process of implementing the Styrian walking strategy in the municipalities.