Municipal Energy Planning
OIKEN uses Urbio’s "Google Maps of Energy" to decarbonize municipalities in Valais
OIKEN, a Swiss-based energy provider, draws positive conclusions from the adoption of Urbio for their energy planning workflows. This "Google Maps of Energy" centralizes all energy data and enables detailed analysis of the building stock. Thanks to Urbio, thousands of buildings have been systematically analyzed, enabling OIKEN to evaluate the energy performance of 24 municipalities in their service area. As a result, the utility is equipped to drive new business opportunities by producing context-specific feasibility studies for district heating networks and heat pumps.
Customer
OIKEN
Sector
Utility
Locations
Switzerland
Challenge
Like most Swiss cantons, Valais is ambitious when it comes to decarbonization. It plans to reduce CO2 emissions from buildings by 80% by 2040. This goal relies in particular on energy suppliers and communes. To meet the growing demand from municipalities, energy suppliers are currently on the hunt for actionable energy and building data. This is a very time-consuming activity, given the scattered nature of the data sources and the clean-up work involved.
Photo: Live session with the OIKEN team on Urbio.
Solution
Urbio is revolutionizing OIKEN’s energy data quest. Similar to Google Maps, but with a focus on energy, Urbio centralizes and visualizes all energy data useful for diagnosing and analyzing municipalities. Access to data is thus facilitated, offering transparency and a simplified analysis, by means of colored maps produced by the minute.
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For more than three years, OIKEN has relied on Urbio as a core component of their operations. OIKEN supports its shareholder municipalities in meeting the challenges of the energy transition, in particular through the production of energy plans that outline the opportunities and constraints of each territory. According to Thierry Bernhard, Head of Energy Consulting at OIKEN, the impact of Urbio’s tool was immediately clear:
The tool proposed by Urbio enables us to consolidate the support to municipalities, by rapidly sketching out different strategic variants for decarbonization. These strategies can be modeled, explained and visualized much faster than before.
Thierry Bernhard, Head of Energy Consulting, OIKEN
Concretely, Thierry Bernhard summarizes their progress: “Thousands of buildings have been analyzed. Urbio enabled us to evaluate the energy performance of 24 municipalities in our service area, and produce feasibility studies for the development of heat pumps or district heating .”
Benefits
A virtuous cycle
With this partnership, Urbio and OIKEN are paving the way to accelerate the decarbonization of Swiss real estate. Thanks to their shared values around energy transition and digitalization, both companies are engaged in a virtuous cycle that benefits not only themselves, but also other players in Switzerland and abroad, multiplying the positive impact on the climate. The collaboration between OIKEN's industry experts and Urbio's deep-tech software team enables the incorporation of new solutions into the web platform, further accelerating the energy transition. The CEO of OIKEN, François Fellay, shares his excitement:
The many synergies with start-ups like Urbio on the Energypolis Campus provide OIKEN with energy-related innovations. Such collaborations enable us to implement concrete solutions to the ambitious objectives of Canton Valais and Switzerland to achieve climate neutrality by 2050.
— François Fellay, CEO of OIKEN
More to come
Urbio continuously develops its software, adding advanced functionalities linked to district heating and continuous data improvements. “The latter is a priority for our clients and therefore for us. In fact, we have tripled our team of data scientists to keep up with demand," emphasizes Sébastien Cajot, Co-founder and CEO of Urbio.
Want to know more? Click here to read about OIKEN’s work with Urbio in Le Nouvelliste.
Photo: Thierry Bernard (left) and William Ruppen (right), at OIKEN.
Credit: sacha.bittel@lenouvelliste.ch
