LOYTEC talks room automation and energy management

Austria-based LOYTEC Electronics, a specialist in innovative building automation solutions, is looking at ways to maximize energy efficiency and management in buildings, which includes room automation and managing electric vehicles.

More and more buildings are adopting building automation solutions, as seen at this year’s Light + Building exhibition in Frankfurt, Germany. We talked to Hans-Jorg Schweinzer, CEO of LOYTEC Electronics, about energy efficiency in buildings and learned about the company’s focus on room automation. 

Room automation to grow

Room automation is where LOYTEC sees the biggest growth in building automation for the company, said Schweinzer. “It’s all about what you do in the rooms where you work and where you live. There we more or less implicitly make the decision of how energy efficient we use the environment.”

“Start from the rooms, start where you are consuming energy. This is a paradigm change, because in the old days, on the server side, we wanted to control the energy generation. But this changes the rules, because you control the energy consumption and you just tell the producers how much you need, how much they should provide you, no more no less,” he explained.

“What we do in the rooms is we calculate exactly how much energy we need and then we tell the air handler, we tell a chiller, heather, how much energy we need. Then on the producer side, it only produces as much as we need,” he explained. By analyzing energy consumption per room the company is able to help building managers more efficiently use, save and allocate resources.

Managing electricity for growing electric vehicles

Schweinzer emphasized that energy savings is a result of integration. “The synergies between lighting, air conditioning, heating, cooling, etc., result in energy savings — energy savings are a result of controls. It is an achievement.”

As the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) grow, building managers must also consider how to allocate electricity for charging stations. “If you give EVs all the power they want, it turns dark in the building. So, the management of how much energy flows into the EVs, this will be more and more decided by the building management,” Schweinzer said.

“This is a big application,” he added. “You have a certain amount of electricity for a building. If you exceed that, you either pay much more money, or you don’t get it. You need to manage it. Who can manage it? It’s the building management system. That’s the only authority that has all the knowledge about where the energy should flow.” 

With the information gathered from the building management system, and the use of EV chargers that support the Open Charge Point Protocol (OCPP), Schweinzer explained building managers can then tell each charger how much energy it gets and when, and that is what a charger can put into the car.