Uppsala University’s buildings (indeed, most or all Swedish university buildings) are owned by Akademiska Hus – in effect, they are the ‘landlords’ of our research labs. Fortunately, as we found out during our Green Laboratory network kickoff meeting, Akademiska Hus cares passionately about energy efficiency and making the University more sustainable.
During the kickoff meeting, we had the pleasure to hear energy engineer John Johnsson speak about what Akademiska Hus has been up to regarding energy efficiency. John kindly agreed to let us reprint his slides and information here.
So, who are Akademiska Hus?
As you can see, Akademiska Hus is a huge company in Sweden. As a result, their values and decisions can have a correspondingly large impact on sustainability. Their ‘climate journey’ began in 2019 – and they have ambitious plans for this decade and beyond.
By 2025 – about 4.5 years from now, they have the goal of reducing the amount of energy delivered to their buildings (meaning, our teaching and research space) by 50%!
You can see in John’s slide above that they specifically want to “collaborate more with our customers in order to join forces and invest in sustainable choices” (emphasis mine). Who are their customers? Well, we are! Given that research labs can use 3-5 times are much energy per square meter compared to office space, research lab ‘customers’ of Akademiska Hus are particularly promising candidates for collaboration (back to our network’s working together theme).
So, how can we work together with Akademiska Hus?
The design and construction of new buildings is clearly an important area. As we heard from Andrew Arnott of The University of Edinburgh during the kickoff meeting, new research buildings can and should be designed from the beginning to be energy efficient. However, most of us are working in laboratories that already exist. So what then?
Well, Akademiska Hus can still help. They can offer heavy-duty testing equipment for monitoring the energy demands of larger research instrumentations/equipment, and they can loan thermal cameras to look for heat loss.
Akademiska Hus also has building-level energy statistics for how much electricity is consumed per month. If we, the consumers, start to make a real impact in lowering our resource consumption, that should be reflected in the numbers seen by Akademiska Hus.
The bottom line: we researchers should collaborate with Akademiska Hus and together make a larger positive impact!
If you want to learn more, ask about borrowing equipment, or propose a collaboration, John has graciously allowed us to post his email address here: john.johnsson@akademiskahus.se. Reach out to him – he’s both passionate about sustainability and very friendly!
