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In the future, architecture must be more closely aligned with climatic requirements. We need to think about energy solutions for the urban future, where houses and neighborhoods are designed to keep their energy needs low and, as far as possible, meet them themselves. How do we achieve this?

Cold district heating networks, also known as anergy networks or heating networks 4.0*, use heat from the ground, water and air to supply neighborhoods and urban districts. The temperatures in the network are significantly below those of conventional district or local heating systems. Cold district heating networks can be fed entirely from renewable energy sources. Therefore, they offer a good opportunity for a sustainable, potentially CO₂- and emission-free heat supply - and thus for climate protection and the achievement of climate protection goals.

*In the English literature, there is already reference to the "5th generation district heating and cooling".

PVT combines photovoltaics with solar thermal energy, i.e. uses sunlight to generate both electricity and heat.

In our projects on the configuration of PVT systems, our customers repeatedly ask the question: What heat yield does a PVT module actually deliver?

The answer to this question, as so often, is: It depends.

Aquathermy uses the thermal energy contained in water to heat or cool. Depending on availability, rivers, lakes or even waste water serve as heat sources.

Aquathermy can therefore be obtained from different sources. We distinguish between

• Thermal energy from surface water (TEO), e.g. from lakes, rivers, etc.
• Thermal energy from waste water (TEA)

Ice storage is becoming increasingly popular in the age of heat pumps and renewable heat sources. They store heat and cold and can thus compensate for fluctuations in supply and demand. This increases the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of heating and cooling systems.

Grey energy refers to the energy required for the production, transport, storage and disposal of a product. This also takes into account all preliminary products up to the extraction of raw materials as well as the energy consumed for the production processes. The federal government is now planning to look more closely at this life cycle assessment of building materials and the life cycle costs of buildings. We explain the role of building physics in energy-efficient construction in our blog post.

The world is changing. The subject of sustainability is at the center of many global political discourses and determines the actions and attitudes to life of a large part of the population. In order to minimize climate change, the international community decided in Paris in 2015 to limit global warming to significantly below 2°C, but more likely to below 1.5°C. The building sector, with its total energy consumption, is of particular importance. With a total final energy consumption of more than 40%, the building sector has a key role to play in this. Consequently, success in achieving the climate targets is strongly linked to change in the building sector. 

With the rise of photovoltaics in Germany, engineers and scientists have brought an old idea back to the table: the PVT or hybrid collector.

The idea is simple and the promise is great: a PV cell has an efficiency of about 20%. So if an additional 20% of 100% solar radiation is lost due to optical losses (reflection etc.) and only 20% is converted into electricity, the remaining 60% is lost. So why not use this as heat!