2024
New Digital Tool for Energy Optimization of Buildings in Denmark
This case addresses a major challenge and a wealth of data: the immense energy loss in Denmark's building stock.
Excluding small buildings like garages and sheds, there are 2,530,838 buildings in Denmark. Six percent of them have an energy label of A – and only 1% are energy-efficient enough to meet the criteria for climate-neutral buildings, as defined in the EU's revised Building Directive from 2023.
In the remaining – nearly 2.5 million – buildings, heat escapes to varying degrees, with a significant portion experiencing larger losses. 68% of municipally owned buildings have an energy label of D or lower, and the same applies to 59% of detached houses.
A building with an energy label of G uses about 20 times more energy for heating than a comparable building with the best energy label. If all buildings were upgraded by just one energy label, we would collectively save 1 million tons of CO2, or 2.5% of Denmark’s total emissions.
The project focuses on minimizing energy waste, which is a huge problem for the climate – but also a waste of money for those who pay the heating bills. About one-third of Denmark's total energy consumption is used for heating, equating to a collective heating bill of nearly 80 billion Danish kroner annually.
To solve the problem, we need to know where energy is being lost and where it makes the most sense to take action first. This is the purpose of the energy label and the new tool we have developed in close collaboration with OBH.
Challenge
Today, 190 companies work with energy labeling of buildings, with OBH being one of the largest. In total, about 70,000 properties are reviewed and labeled each year. This number is expected to rise as the EU’s revised Building Directive is implemented, so that eventually all 2.5 million buildings in Denmark will have an up-to-date energy label. Until recently, the entire industry used the same tool for this work. But from today, there are now two.
Solution
In addition to creating competition in the market, OBH’s new SaaS solution introduces several innovations that optimize the process and provide more precise energy labels, enabling a sharper prioritization of potential improvements.
Climate Envelope Composer: The most significant innovation is a tool that makes it easier to handle buildings from different decades with vastly different construction traditions and material choices. There are still some houses in Denmark from the 1400s, and a third of all detached houses were built before 1950. So, how do you build a tool that can accurately handle U-values and lambda-values across everything from townhouses, mason-built homes, and typical 1970s-style houses – many of which have been renovated, modernized, and possibly even energy-optimized multiple times over the years? – and how can the same tool be applied to commercial and industrial buildings?
The solution was the Climate Envelope Composer, where instead of selecting from an endless list of "standard walls, windows, floors, and roofs," you can construct the specific part of the climate envelope using various materials in different layers and thicknesses, forming the basis for much more precise calculations of the entire structure's heat loss and insulation performance – through lambda and U-values.
Full Offline Functionality: The solution is also designed so that the energy consultant can work an entire day offline, only needing internet access to download daily tasks and again when data needs to be uploaded to the calculation core, enabling the generation of key figures and reports.
Collaboration & Quality Assurance: The consultant reviewing the building is responsible for each report, but the new solution allows consultants to collaborate and receive professional input from colleagues.
The solution is built on a microservice architecture, so the functionality is logically and structurally separated and can be maintained and developed independently. For instance, there is one service handling integration with the calculation core, B18, maintained by BUILD at Aalborg University, and another service that handles data delivery to and report generation from the Danish Energy Agency’s system. The architecture makes it easier to integrate with new data providers and partners in the future.
Data is exchanged via REST APIs, and where the solution needs to communicate with legacy systems based on SOAP/XML, a middleware has been developed so that the solution does not inherit legacy structures.
The solution’s microservices are hosted in Azure, the admin/backend is built in Laravel 8, and the interface used by energy consultants in the field is developed using the Nuxt 3 framework – both hosted in DigitalOcean. IndexedDB is used for local storage of climate envelope logic and concrete data so work can continue without an internet connection.
Result
For OBH, the project is about owning the digital product development so the company can prioritize further development of BEMO and, for example, work on new energy renovation solutions, building materials, and partnerships both in Denmark and internationally. The resources previously used for external software subscriptions can now be invested in their own product development.
The ambition is to make energy renovation and maintenance of the existing building stock more manageable and attractive, contributing to the green transition.
This can also have a positive socio-economic effect by extending the lifespan of the building stock, preserving our shared cultural heritage, and protecting the unique qualities and craftsmanship traditions that are lost when old (heritage-worthy) buildings are replaced by new construction.
People
Team
All dwarf profiles
Other work
OBH Rådgivende Ingeniører
Improved Data Quality and 67% Reduced Call Time
