Does everyone in an office building turn on the heaters themselves or is the temperature automatically controlled based on the weather conditions and the respective room usage? Is the air conditioning running at full blast as the summer sun warms the rooms through the large windows or do the blinds automatically lower to keep things cool?
Huge energy and CO2 savings can be achieved with intelligent building automation, yet not even one in eight companies (12%) use such technologies. After all, 22% plan to install digital building technologies in the near future. And 30 percent can at least imagine doing so, but without pursuing any corresponding plan. These are the results of a survey of 506 companies with 20 or more employees, representative of the German economy as a whole.
According to this, intelligent building automation is generally not a problem for a third (32%). “In the construction sector in Germany one of the largest quantities of energy is used, and here mainly gas. In addition to traffic and industrial production, the construction sector is a major cause of CO2 emissions,” says Matthias Hartmann, member of the executive board of Bitkom. “Digital technologies can massively reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the need energy of buildings”.
Overall, digital technologies can contribute almost a third of Germany's construction sector to meeting its 2030 climate goals. According to a study commissioned by the digital association Bitkom, up to 14.7 million tonnes could be saved in this way. of CO2 emissions. This corresponds to almost 30 percent of the reduction target for the construction sector of 51 million tonnes of CO2 formulated in the Climate Protection Act.
The key technologies are intelligent control of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. Important fields of application are also the production of hot water and lighting. “The necessary savings will not be achieved with the help of traditional energy-saving construction or renovation measures alone, if only because there are not enough skilled craftsmen for such a mammoth project. We need more results-oriented financing that takes into account take into account the use of digital technologies. Even more: we need a wave of digital renewal,” emphasizes Hartmann.