The project “FlexKälte” (Joint project: Investigation of existing cooling systems in order to use flexibilities in a real world application; sub-project: Campus instrumentation for optimal cooling system control) has the aim to develop a methodology to make use of the flexibility of decentralized, cold producing and cold using plants existing in a property. Besides the identification of the flexibility potential, the “FlexKälte” project focuses on the demonstration of the practical feasibility of an efficient and economic operation of cooling in a real world application, while at the same time ensuring the identified boundary conditions, such as user comfort.

Within the scope of the project, distributed cooling applications at KIT Campus North will be instrumented, connected, and virtually combined for central control. First, different optimization strategies to be developed are tested with a large number of cooling systems in a simulation and then the practical implementation is realized in an exemplarily. The intended central management should enable the virtual network to serve as cooling capacity/storage in the overall system and thus - beyond operational optimization - to react on changing supply network conditions.