Urban buildings are responsible for upwards of 80% of the greenhouse gases. In European cities, Bios can reduce the environmental & social impacts by transforming wasted energy into food. Bios has invented the link between controlled environmental agriculture & building energy management systems.We develop low-carbon technology which exploits energy recovery in buildings for bio-circular food production & carbon accounting as a systemic intervention for cities to achieve net Zero Carbon goals.
These buildings consume huge amounts of energy. Depending on the type of building (its age, use; commercial or services) the efficiency can be in the range of 30% to 60%, depending on the season (Energies 2017, Towards Nearly Zero Energy Buildings in Europe: A Focus on Retrofit in Non-Residential Buildings). Targeting Europe initially, about 35% of the EU's buildings are over 50 years old and almost 75% of the building stock is energy inefficient. Renovation of existing buildings can lead to significant energy savings, as it could reduce the EU’s total energy consumption by 5-6% and lower CO2 emissions by about 5%. Energy performance & emissions of cities need to comply with the European Directive 2010/31/UE, driving the €41 billion industry across the EU in 2018.
At the same time, global populations forecast point to 10 billion people in 2050 & the food system faces serious problems to meet this future demand. Buildings with onsite food services carry additional CO2 burden through transportation, packaging and waste of fresh produce. In the context of health care or multinational food corporations’ access to secure supply of clean food ingredients with low CO2 impact is important for conscious consumer trends. This consumer trend is critical for multinational companies seeking to reduce impact and improve sustainability of their brands into 2030.
Current solutions apply energy recovery systems to optimize building’s consumption, renewable energy generation or improve utilization across climate control and operational areas. This provides buildings with tools to neutralise CO2 footprints connected to their energy consumption only. These solutions do nothing with the energy waste in the form of heat, air velocity, humidity or carbon produced through climate systems. Using improved energy recovery technologies, building energy management systems (BEMS) and automation, Bios integrates CEA to exploit these additional resources, i.e. utilise the otherwise wasted energy.
The purpose of Bios is to offer building operators and owners of existing buildings in Europe solutions for optimizing resources in order to achieve zero carbon ratings through ISO standards and LEED certification. By integrating BEMS with CEA, we have created the link for carbon improvement data sensed from the physical building. Using urban agriculture, ag-tech, data & AI optimization we convert excess energy & CO2 from buildings into healthy food or tree saplings for reforestation. Our solution is a CEA unit installed inside high-energy consuming buildings in unused technical spaces, in order to integrate with energy and climate systems to exploit wasted energy, space and utilize available carbon. This is how Bios produces the carbon data for buildings to achieve Zero Carbon targets faster.
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