The Building

The Sustainable Town Planning Centre is a trapezial block. The building has a surface area of 1,352.73 m2, and 6 levels (-1, 0, +1, +2, +3 and rooftop), which are connected by a ramp that descends smoothly from the rooftop.

The aim of the building is to be a “model” of sustainability based on the efficiency of its installations, and a “portal” for energy saving bio-climatic techniques applied to town planning, since the building and its surroundings have included a large number of innovative technologies and energy appliances (geo-thermal energy with heat pump and radiant floor, biomass boiler, cooling by buried piping, system of absorption for refrigeration…).

The data provided by the tele-command network, a fibre optic network enabling the measurement of the consumption of the public service networks of the sector, from Valdespartera is collected in the building, as are a series of parameters on energy consumption and comfort conditions in homes.

The tele-command network

The goal of the tele-command network project is to capture all the data supplied by the public service networks as well as those concerning comfort and consumptions homes. The tele-command network has therefore been set up as a basic tool for the “measurement” of the real energy behaviour of the sector.

The basic components of the tele-command network area as follows:

• A network for the measurement and capture of data from all the public service networks. The measurement network comprises elements distributed around the neighbourhood to capture data from the range of service networks, such as levels of water deposits, circulation levels through different sectors, consumptions, quality of the water supplied, monitoring of rain water and storm tanks, consumption and programming of provisions for irrigation, consumption of street lighting, electrical consumption, volume and classification of waste, meteorological parameters, etc. The measurement elements unify data obtained in the same format for dispatch to the Interpretation Centre.
• A data transmission network from capture points. This transmission network is made up of a fibre optics network running all around the neighbourhood and uniting all the reading points.

The network provides an integrated view of the sector that enables firstly, more effective execution of the technical management of the networks themselves by providing the Technical Services responsible for their exploitation with data, and secondly, generation of a knowledge base to allow for the interpretation and dissemination of the bio-climatic behaviour of Valdespartera in the framework of the European project RENAISSANCE of the CONCERTO programme.