Prof. Carsten Wemhöner

The "GreenHub" project is one of a total of eight large-scale flagship projects of the Swiss Innovation Agency (Innosuisse). Together with 16 research partners, the consortium led by OST is pursuing a clear goal: the development of systemic and innovative approaches for the production, conversion and storage of renewable energy into environmentally friendly liquid fuels using raw materials supplied, for example, by waste incineration plants.

Net zero or plus energy buildings will establish themselves as the new building standard of the future. In Uster, detailed monitoring has been carried out over two years of the first MINERGIE-A certified building in the canton of Zurich with office use as part of Annex 49.

The Black & White building in Pfäffikon SZ is centrally located and combines commercial use on the ground floor, office use on the first two upper floors and multi-family residential use on the third and fourth floors and the attic of the building. The field measurements evaluated over a year and the simulations carried out confirm that a zero energy balance can be achieved even in an urban environment with the photovoltaic system integrated into the roof and façade and the highly efficient heat pump.

Massive Bauteile wie Betondecken bieten eine hohe thermische Masse zur Speicherung von Wärme und Kälte und zur Dämpfung der Raumtemperatur. Mit dem Industriepartner Barcol-Air Group AG, Schwerzenbach, ist ein innovatives Hybridkühldeckenmodul mit Betondeckenaktivierung im Rahmen eines Innosuisse Projekts entwickelt worden, dass höhere Free-Cooling Anteile ermöglicht als konventionelle Kühldecken, womit sich Einsparungen von elektrischer Energie realisieren lassen.

Experience from various pilot and demonstration projects, as well as the assessment of experts, suggests that heating and cooling systems are often oversized. However, since there were no systematic studies on this topic in Switzerland, the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) commissioned the SPF and the IET - Institute of Energy Technology with the OptiPower project. The team examined a total of 341 heating systems in the multi-family house sector and ten administrative buildings with regard to the heating and cooling power actually required based on the evaluation of measurement data and the installed power. It was found that in the multi-family housing sector there is a median oversizing of 44 % and in the administrative buildings the systems are oversized by a factor of 2-3. The project team further investigated how this oversizing affects the costs and efficiency of the heat pumps and formulated corresponding recommendations in the final report.