Driving local partnerships to reduce energy consumption in buildings

In a world increasingly reliant on renewable energy, fostering strong local and community partnerships is essential to maximize its potential and ensure sustainable growth.

Through four complementary projects in the Netherlands, CGI contributes to reducing energy consumption in buildings and advancing the transition to renewable energy in both cities and rural communities.  

Making our office more sustainable

During a two-year renovation project, CGI Partners in our Rotterdam office worked closely with the building owner to make our office space more sustainable. This included improving the layout of work areas and communal spaces to increase energy efficiency and reduce electricity and heat consumption.

The building, one of the country’s first to be A+++ certified, also houses three bee colonies on the roof and multiple insect hotels in the garden as part of a CGI-managed green office campaign.

Setting up a local smart energy hub

In a project launched by Green Business Club Rotterdam Alexander, CGI Partners joined neighboring businesses to investigate setting up a local smart energy hub to perform grid balancing and limit grid congestion.

The project aims to achieve energy self-sufficiency for area office buildings while supporting an increase in energy consumption (e.g., for electric vehicles (EVs) and heating) without putting additional strain on the district’s already overloaded electricity grid.

We bring our IT expertise, knowledge of utilities market data hubs (e.g., Energie Data Services Nederland, Energinet, Fingrid), experience with local energy hub projects (e.g., NO-GIZMOS).

Building positive energy districts

CGI served as a consortium partner on MAKING-CITY, a five-year project to build positive energy districts (PEDs), which are urban areas that generate more energy than they consume. PEDs focus on integrating renewable energy sources and optimizing energy efficiency, contributing to climate goals, and fostering local energy independence.

Part of Horizon 2020, the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, the initiative focused on the creation of operational models to help cities worldwide define a long-term vision for the energy transition.

For the project, we developed the CGI Energy Islands Platform, which provides real-time data insights into the local energy grid balance. We supported testing and validation of the PED concept in two Lighthouse cities, Groningen (Netherlands) and Oulu (Finland), which was then replicated in six other cities.

Enabling optimal battery usage

CGI is also advancing renewable energy use in rural communities through NO-GIZMOS, a research consortium that includes energieKansen, Enexis, Eindhoven University of Technology, Hanzehogeschool Groningen, and iWell.

The objective of the pilot project, based in the small village of Ansen, is to determine the optimal use of home batteries to take pressure off the community’s overloaded electricity grid.

We used the CGI Energy Islands Platform to increase grid flexibility and capacity and improve renewable electricity storage. Home batteries installed in households and farms were then connected to the platform, which collects energy-related data and provides an application programming interface (API) for managing the batteries.

From July 2024 to April 2026, we will conduct a series of increasingly complex use cases to gain a comprehensive understanding of how to optimally deploy the home batteries, ultimately advancing the adoption of renewable energy.

Learn more about CGI’s renewable energy solutions.