In three different pilot areas – a commercial area, a mixed-use area and a residential area – local businesses and residents are to cooperate both in the production and storage of solar energy (pooling for self-consumption) and in the use of electric vehicles (sharing, “Mobility as a Service”). This addresses two problems that are emerging in Switzerland and in Winterthur in the context of the Energy Strategy 2050: on the one hand, the sluggish expansion of solar energy and, on the other hand, the high density of fossil-fuelled motorised private transport.
The project is based on the cooperation of various partners from Winterthur from the fields of higher education/education, industry, structural and civil engineering and city administration. In particular, the areas are confronted with the issue of combining self-use and shared mobility. While the installation of a PV system including ZEV will soon be a matter of course in new buildings, e-vehicle sharing is still not very widespread here either. ZEV^2, on the other hand, starts with existing buildings and aims to design the optimal solution for mixed areas by combining technologies (metering infrastructure, energy management system, charging infrastructure – and the digital networking of these three systems) and needs (use, billing, transparency).
The project is being carried out by the City of Winterthur under the project management of the Climate Unit. The project is also financially supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy with the Front Runner programme.
Further information is available on request from the Smart City programme management.
Tag: Verringerung
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Self-consumption community in the double sense
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EPFL doctoral student calls for smaller apartments
The ecological footprint of living in Switzerland by 2050 can only be reduced through a joint effort by homeowners and tenants. According to a press release from the university in Lausanne, this demand for smaller living space per capita is raised in Margarita Agriantoni's doctoral thesis. She is a civil engineering student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ( EPFL ).
The work is based on computer simulations of various living scenarios for the next 30 years from 2020 to 2050. The result is therefore: If the energy consumption of apartments in Switzerland is to be significantly reduced, the entire industry must rethink its practices. This affects the way homes are planned and built, as well as the way they are used. Less living space is required per resident.
Around 58 percent of Swiss households rent their homes. The average living space of these apartments has risen steadily in recent years, as has the living space per capita – a key figure that directly correlates with a building's ecological footprint, according to the statement. Today, a 100 square meter apartment is built or heated in the same way, whether it is intended for two or four people. "The per capita area is the key figure that we have to reduce in the long term," the author Agriantoni is quoted as saying. "Reducing space by just a few square feet can have a real impact."
Agriantoni and her colleagues examined 11,000 apartments in buildings across Switzerland and interviewed 1,000 households.