Sustainable Future with Intelligent Energy Load Management 

Are you tired of hearing about investment decisions or policies on heat pumps, PV, energy storage, wallboxes, electric cars and the hype around dynamic electricity pricing? Or frustrated by how badly Germany is performing in the smart meter rollout? Or how difficult it is to retrofit existing buildings? Or are you excited about the potential of dynamic energy consumption, smart load management and a greener, more autarc way of living?

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Whatever you feel, all these elements of the green transformation have in common that without each other, and without an intelligent system to connect them, their individual potential cannot be realized. Each component is only as strong and efficient as it is designed and connected as one system. If we are to achieve a sustainable transformation in the way we design and operate buildings, we must think in systems, not components. We need to think across components and interfaces, across corporate boundaries and across industries to achieve interoperability. Because consumers and our planet will no longer tolerate isolated components and interface problems. The promised effect of AI-based load management to monitor and shift energy consumption or even production remains in too many cases a fuzzy promise. Especially when it comes to larger buildings such as airports or hospitals.

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Thus, our cross-industry consortium came together to take a systems perspective and analyze the implications for both thermal and electrical energy flows concerning load management and the respective problems that need to be solved. There is huge potential evident in smaller buildings, as we can all see daily in the media or in our daily lives in our own four walls.

But larger buildings also have great potential for load management. Although, of course, the enormous complexity of configuring and connecting existing multivalent energy systems in large buildings makes the latter a particularly tough nut to crack.

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Moreover, as one of our guests put it,

"The house of the future is already built. 90% of the buildings in Germany already exist. So the open innovation consortium aims to tackle problems that will help renovate existing buildings with energy management solutions that can integrate all existing components across interfaces to deliver on the promise of intelligent load management and justify investment decisions in favour of renewable energy systems."

One key challenge we worked on, was how to convince the different stakeholders in large buildings to invest in load management and to take the necessary steps to transform existing buildings into smart, intelligent and load-management-ready buildings that significantly improve their carbon footprint. We thank our partners for their active engagement and are excited to see what will evolve from this starting point in the coming weeks.

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We are more convinced than ever that the problems analyzed cannot be solved by a single company, but only through open innovation and collaboration across companies and industries.