Keeping an eye on energy
EU project promotes energy efficiency in hospitals
These days, the efficient and timely management of buildings used for the provision of services involves keeping a tight control on energy costs and exploiting every opportunity to cut expenditures. An increasing number of companies are including environmental and climate objectives in their business goals. A pan-European efficiency project called “Re-Commissioning – Raising Energy Performance in Existing Non-Residential Buildings,” which is being coordinated by the Graz Energy Agency, aims to save energy and costs in 11 complex service buildings in 8 European countries. One of the project partners is the Stuttgart-based Steinbeis Transfer Center for Energy, Building and Solar Engineering (EGS).
Conserving energy doesn’t always require large investments. In larger, complex service buildings, often the most economic and profitable way to save is through technical or organizational optimizations, i.e., the way energy devices are operated, or encouraging more economical use of energy.
The target of the 33-month EU project is to achieve primary energy savings of at least 10% through “low-or-no-cost” measures. The aim is to bring together and network individual parties – users, technicians, management – and thus achieve better results than if each party worked individually.
The Steinbeis Transfer Center for Energy, Building and Solar Engineering is participating in the project working out energy saving measures in the BGU Ludwigshafen, a trade union trauma clinic. The clinic uses around 30,000 MW hours of energy per year. Its annual energy bill is around € 2.5 million. The clinic belongs to a network of 12 clinics in delivthe statutory accident insurance program and is one of the biggest trauma clinics in Europe.