Case Study

Measuring the Impact of Actions to Reduce Energy Consumption in Austria

Big Energy Data (software company), 2013 - 2017

The Problem

Austrian governments need to quantify the impact of new construction laws and policies which they release to reduce the energy consumption of buildings.
With its EU building directive the European Union has set a target for all new buildings to be nearly zero-energy by 2020. As a result governments release stricter policies every year to increase the energy efficiency of new and refurbished buildings. In Austria there was neither a way to quantify the status quo of building energy usage nor a way to analyze the change over the years.

The Solution

We developed the product ZEUS - a set of B2B web applications to collect energy data that would feed information into our energy analysis tool to enable governments to measure the impact of their actions.
At Big Energy Data I led the full product cycle for a set of tools to collect energy usage data and to measure the impact of new laws and policies on actual energy consumption of buildings. The core system is the ZEUS database application which holds data describing the building envelopes, HVAC systems and energy consumptions of roughly 500,000 Austrian buildings.

Impact

ZEUS supports professionals in planning more energy efficient buildings.

Over 5 years we launched B2B web apps for 10,000+ professionals. Architects, property developers and HVAC technicians use the ZEUS web app to plan buildings more energy efficiently. They upload their building plans and energy performance certificates to the system and run automated checks to comply with current construction policies and subsidy guidelines. These B2B tools are integrated with our product that enables citizens to submit applications for building permits or housing subsidies to the governments.

ZEUS enables building owners to benchmark energy usage.

HVAC maintenance professionals and facility managers use the energy accounting feature and HVAC application to collect meter readings for eletricity, water and heating in regular intervals. This enables them to track individual usage and benchmark their buildings against similar ones. This way we increase awareness and analyze mismatches of initial planning and actual energy consumption.

ZEUS quantifies energy reduction.

The ZEUS analytics platform enables governments to run analysis on hundreds of thousands of Austrian buildings, calculate the status quo and visualize the changes in the building energy efficiency over the years. It allows government departments and city agencies to track changes back to the actions they took (e.g. the introduction of stricter construction laws, new housing subsidies, …)