Theme article
The convergence of climate change and digitalisation presents building owners with a unique opportunity to enhance economic efficiency and climate protection simultaneously. This can be achieved through climate-intelligent property management, which integrates these two objectives in a mutually reinforcing manner.
Climate change is probably the greatest challenge of our time. According to forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate changes that are already visible will continue to intensify until 2100. Extreme weather conditions will increase in frequency and intensity. Heavy rain, heatwaves and storms will pose a challenge to the resilience and performance of structures and materials. According to the scientists, the effects of climate change will vary greatly from region to region, and in densely built-up areas there may even be an overlap or intensification of urban climate effects.
In order to mitigate the consequences of climate change, many countries have committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Germany, for example, aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 40 per cent by 2020. A key lever here is the real estate sector, which is responsible for 20 per cent of CO2 emissions in Germany and consumes more than 40 per cent of final energy for space heating, hot water and lighting. One of the goals of the Climate Action Plan 2050, which includes measures in agriculture, mobility, construction and housing, is to make the building stock in Germany almost climate-neutral by 2050. To achieve this, the legislature has passed corresponding laws and set up funding programmes.
The noventic group wants to make a holistic contribution to achieving the goal of a climate-neutral building stock - by means of climate-intelligent property management. In concrete terms, this means that
-
energy modernisation can be planned precisely and cost-effectively based on newly acquired knowledge about the actual energy requirements of buildings. This maximises the CO2 avoidance benefit for every euro invested.
-
Energy consumption becomes transparent: Building owners, managers or users can have a visualised overview of their consumption on online platforms. Based on this information, users can check and adjust their consumption behaviour, save resources and money - and thus directly avoid the emission of greenhouse gases.
-
This means that no more energy than is needed is supplied on a decentralised basis and surplus renewable energy from the transmission grids can be stored for the building supply. Buildings are thus intelligently integrated into the supply networks and become grid-friendly.
-
owners, managers or users are notified of problems in a building at an early stage, e.g. in the event of leaks or maintenance requirements for decentralised energy generation systems.
-
aggregated building data becomes the basis for new business models.
In order to achieve the climate targets, high energy-efficient building standards are now required. These standards cost money - both in new builds and, in the long term, in existing buildings. Irrespective of the discussion about the distribution of costs between tenants, building owners and the state, the climate-intelligent management of properties offers economic advantages in the energy supply of buildings. This means that necessary investments can be amortised. This is where noventic's new and comprehensive range of services comes in.
The term "climate intelligence" does not just mean offering products and services that can be used to generate heating cost bills. Rather, the classic heating bill is the starting point for creating a new awareness of one's own consumption in the climate-intelligent control of properties - through visualisations of daily consumption. Because consumers adapt their usage behaviour and thus use resources more sparingly, this is a direct and important contribution to climate protection.
The aim is therefore to consistently stop wasting resources and make life easier for tenants, property managers and building owners. With its wide range of products and services, the noventic group offers various customer groups - from the housing industry and metering service providers to energy suppliers and municipal utilities - solutions for the digitalised and networked measurement of consumption and its analysis in order to harness further efficiency potential.
The first important step is to network all the measuring devices in a property. And in such a way that they can exchange data with each other securely, i.e. BSI-compliant, but not proprietary, i.e. compatible with all standards. Smart meter gateways collate the data and make it usable. The consumption data from all metering points is made available on online platforms, which are also non-proprietary, so that housing companies can decide for themselves for what purpose they use the data. The data platform is the basis on which new added value is created via new applications.
In pilot projects, energy savings of five to ten per cent could be achieved with just a small investment in a networked metering infrastructure. The leverage was the resulting transparency regarding the energy efficiency of the decentralised energy supply systems and the optimised system operation derived from this.
Figures from the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety also demonstrate the importance of such projects: ‘As realised renovation projects show, the energy consumption of a building can be reduced by an average of around 50 per cent, and in some cases even up to 90 per cent, with well thought-out planning. This not only means significantly lower energy costs for tenants and owner-occupiers, but owners also benefit from a preservation or even an increase in the value of their property and thus better long-term rentability.’
The new building standards can be taken into account directly in the construction of new zero-energy houses, for example. However, as the Association of German Engineers writes: ‘As the proportion of new buildings is less than one per cent, there is hardly any overall effect. The first step must be to focus on existing buildings - especially in terms of energy efficiency.’ This is why the noventic group wants to have a particular impact on this existing building stock.
The bottom line is that the noventic group is committed to avoiding CO2 and reducing energy waste, which not only has a positive economic impact, but also contributes to climate protection - for the climate-intelligent management of properties.