TIAR: Renewable Energy Production, Storage and Distribution; A New Multidisciplinary Approach for the Design of Rural Facility

The uncontrolled sprawling of energy plants by renewable sources has conducted, together with important energy benefits, also relevant negative effects for the environment, such as (i) huge land occupation with low energy density per surface unit and (ii) problems on the social acceptance of the renewable plants. Significant discomfort has been created by distributed and remote energy generation and the non continuous production by non-programmable sources such as wind and Sun, that exposes the energy grid to frequent shocks breaking the energy demand/response. The solution represented by integrated energy technologies within the building structure with vertical extension, converted to an integrated system for renewable energy production, storage and supply, is dealt with in this work. This intelligent building, provided with electric and thermal storage systems, is combined with meteorological stations for weather forecasting and final users’ energy consumption monitoring to program the energy strategy on production, storage and distribution. The University of Perugia, is responsible for a research project called TIAR, the Italian acronym for Environmental Hydraulics Rural Tower, supported by Italian Ministry of Forestry and Agriculture in which the multi-energy system is modelled within the structure of a rural tower, which architecture is retrofitted by the same TIAR project intervention. The multidisciplinary research team provides the integrated assessment of the modelling and of the optimization of the architectural, energy, hydraulics, geotechnical, structural systems and bio-agronomic investigation on useful plant species for biomass exploitation. The case study consists of a sort of agriturism located near to Perugia, Italy, where the installation of renewable energy sources in the form of solar, geothermal through micro-energy piles, and hydroelectric through a tank suspended inside the tower, will be carried out. The prototype, in the perspective of this multidisciplinary project, is retrofitted and re-evaluated from an architectonical and structural point of view, given that the dove tower represents a typical rural construction in central Italy agricultural territory.