Swiss Cleantech businesses have expertise in the following areas:
- Energy efficient building standards
- Heating, ventilation, air-conditioning
- Building shell technologies and Insulation
- Smart Grid
- Minergie: the most successful building standard for sustainability
Intelligent power grids are a key requirement for the use of increasingly decentralized electricity production through wind, photovoltaics, small-scale hydroelectric plants and PlusEnergy houses, homes which produce more energy than the owners need. Thinking also extends to harnessing the battery storage capacity of electric vehicles. To make all of that possible, you need advanced monitoring and control technology which provides electric power grid stability. Swiss companies are among the world’s leading suppliers of such smart grids which are often combined with smart metering.
Complementing moves towards more efficient methods of feeding power into the grid and distributing it, Switzerland is also targeting a reduction in energy demand – in particular via building technology. The Minergie® standard was launched in 1998 and has become the world’s most successful voluntary standard for sustainable buildings. In Switzerland itself over 35,000 buildings covering a total of 47 million square meters have received Minergie certification to date. One in five new builds in Switzerland is designed and constructed to meet the low-energy standard. The proportion of renovation and refurbishment projects using the standard is increasing dramatically. Minergie P leads to savings of up to 85 percent as a result of improvements to the building shell and building services. These performance levels are considerably more strict and demanding than other standards. That isn’t the end of the story, however. Recently, the Minergie A standard has been rolled out. It reduces a building’s energy consumption for heating and services to zero.
