Jörg Lorenz

Nominated by: Thomas Delher, Value5 GmbH

DESCRIPTION OF THE ACTIVE ROLE TOWARDS ENERGY EFFICIENCY IN EUROPE

Jörg Lorenz has started to focus on all-topics of IT to IT-based energy efficiency processes in 2006. Gathering different housing companies from all over Europe, he has initiated HORIZON projects and adjusted them with the EU federations in Brussels like HOUSING EUROPE and GdW. He has initiated different EU-project groups to adjust the participation in EU tenders. He has coordinated these groups after having established his EU network with leading federations from Scandinavia, Poland, the Baltic States, BENELUX, France, Italy, Spain and Hungary.

In 2007 he founded an association called “green with IT Berlin-Brandenburg” to separate IT-based energy efficiency processes from green IT-processes which focus only on the self-consumption of its components. First, he  focused strictly on energy efficiency processes of heating consumption in the field of systems and installation engineering together with housing companies as early adopter.

After 2010, he started integrating end-users and tenants into energy saving processes that brought back money to end-users and to inspire them for these energy and CO2-saving processes. End-users got an active role and felt integrated into climate changing processes.

In 2014 he started a transnational piloting group to demonstrate innovations in energy efficiency processes. He gathered different housing companies in different climate areas and implemented energy efficiency processes together with the tenants in 330 flats. He collected savings and evaluated these within five years. He delivered concrete saving amounts of heating energy and allocated the saving amounts to different energy efficiency processes, which followed strictly the yearly deducted costs, collected and billed by the landlords respecting the legislative rules for billing “warm costs”.

He published a scientific report, issued in German and English, reflecting parameters of the network-member’s technichal specialisation..

He was decorated with regional, national and international awards from an EU-association and the worldwide habitat.org in 2021 for the clear and practicable energy efficiency processes useful for housing companies as well as for end users.

CREATIVITY AND STRATEGIC VISION

Jörg Lorenz created a visible and practical application scenario for anticipating future developments in using smart meter gateways, gateways, monitoring systems and energy efficiency processes, which were in the stadium of a technical readiness level of 6, 7 and 8 on a scale from TRL 1 to 9. He anticipated the upcoming efficiency actions in the field of heating consumption by integrating the ideas of personally concerned target audience. He identified potential opportunities to strengthen the German capital region Berlin-Brandenburg and consequently perpetuated the established local network “green with IT Berlin-Brandenburg”. Beyond that he founded the local action group “COP 21 Berlin”. Especially safety and security matters were put in front of efficiency processes that could not be disturbed by third parties anymore. This was a basic demand of all participants before starting action in concrete energy saving processes.

Local authorities and ministers recommended him to go to a doctor, if he would “have visions”. But this could not stop his unflinching activities to create innovations with should deliver concrete saving amount in field projects. The project framework was designed to enable its results for a dissemination all across Europe.

He brought the ideas and results of the piloting action and demonstration projects into different EU-HORIZON 2022 projects.

IMPACT

Jörg Lorenz evidenced concrete energy efficiency saving rates:

1. offline-use of artificial intelligence to establish single room solutions free of battery or wire use, that was helpful to all the participating tenants, because they didn´t have to do anything by themselves like programming etc. This saved 20 to 30 % of heating consumption;
2. implementing gateways for bidirectional management of heating systems, which saved 10-15 % and implementing energy efficiency processes like predictive forecast data into the load curves of the systems, stopping the danger of legionella infecting by monitoring the whole management processes etc. This added not only financial, but life saving processes;
3. implementing smart meter gateways into the heating consumption data management as an extension of pure power energy processes, following the upcoming rules of the legislative framework published by the national authority for its security “Bundesamt für die Sicherheit der Informationstechnik” BSI. He opened up new telemetric data collecting processes that were later integrated into the legislative framework calls “TR 03109-5” and used this predictable processes during piloting project milestones long time before these processes were finally legislated. But it was not an accident, that all of these piloted processes happened to be designed exactly in the way the legislation would execute.

Nowadays, as these processes are working in a legislative framework, Jörg Lorenz can deliver energy efficiency results in heating consumption on the base of long-year designed pilot projects which had once been a vision (without the need to go to a doctor).

LEADERSHIP

Jörg Lorenz designed the upcoming energy and cost saving amounts in comprehensible steps, adding the carbon saving aspects to all of these topics. He could motivate the scientists from the involved university HTW Berlin to lead these processes from the perspectives of the science. He motivated the housing companies in describing the benefit for them and integrated them in several pre-project talks of the university. After convincing the housing companies, the tenants were integrated by initiating different energy talks in the neighborhoods, introducing the aims of the project in energy efficiency benefits to them and adjusting the processes of implementing the needed hardware into their flats.

This inspired the involved parties to follow the designed “template” and bring it into use in all of their quarters following the template´s details.

Parties felt integrated in a project framework, that evaluated all of them in one strictly for all designed evaluation framework. So all of these parties were curious about the results and very satisfied, how much efficiency in clearly designed efficiency processes they could bring into their ESG-documentation, into their yearly reports and the soft skill results of collaborating in a friendly way together with their tenants.

The housing associations all across Germany published the results and motivated many more housing companies to adopt the energy saving processes. All the involved parties including the tenants got an active role to become a part of climate change action with measurable results. All the parties were satisfied to be able to present concrete key performance indicators. They feel now more optimistic to be able to work with the upcoming Smart Readiness.

Curious to find out if Jörg will be the winner of the Roger Léron Award 2022?