Telia and Danfoss Leanheat have partnered in Finland to develop a heating optimization solution that enables Finnish property owners to reduce their buildings’ energy consumption by up to 10 percent – although some properties have achieved reductions of up to twice that amount in optimal circumstances.
One of the smart building solutions offered by Danfoss Leanheat – a company with Finnish roots that was acquired by a Danish multinational company – is a district heating optimization service that is already used in 200,000 apartments in Finland.
As a result of their cooperation, Telia and Danfoss Leanheat now expect they will be able to reduce energy consumption in more than a million Finnish homes. The jointly developed solution involves installing Telia’s Indoor Climate Monitoring sensors in each apartment to collect temperature and humidity data. The sensors are connected to a cloud service that enables the data they collect to be stored, analyzed and visualized in a user portal. The collected indoor climate data can be combined with weather forecasts, outside temperature data and historical heating consumption information to automatically optimize the building’s heating. With Telia Heating Optimization, managing district heating becomes easy and cost-effective.
Kimmo Ahvenlampi, an IoT specialist at Telia, cites figures from Motiva, a company owned by the Finnish state that promotes the efficient and sustainable use of energy and materials, to illustrate why Telia Heating Optimization has so much potential to make a difference in Finland.
“Three-quarters of Finland’s residential building stock is insufficiently regulated, according to Motiva,” Ahvenlampi explains. “Our joint service works like the building’s own artificial intelligence: it optimizes the building’s energy consumption and produces data, which you can then use to take the right actions to continuously improve the energy efficiency of the building and tenant comfort.”
Lauri Hiekkanen, a sales manager at Danfoss Leanheat in Finland, sees further benefits.
“With energy optimization, the housing associations can quickly start saving on heating energy and collect data to support other energy-saving measures,” Hiekkanen says. “Telia’s strong position with the housing associations is very valuable to succeed in reducing energy consumption for more sustainable building operations.”
The EU has estimated that buildings are responsible for 40 percent of energy consumption and 36 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.
“Optimizing energy consumption is important for both cities and property owners, given fluctuating energy prices and sharper climate targets,” Ahvenlampi says. “Buildings play a key role in making cities more sustainable – and it is great that Telia is part of the solution.”
