An interdisciplinary research team has developed an energy master plan for the campus belonging to the Technische Universität Braunschweig. Various scenarios for developing the campus as far as 2020 have been created with the aim of reducing the primary energy consumption by 40% and, in the long term, facilitating the conversion to renewable energy. Planning principles have been developed for the renovation and urban development of the site that can also be transferred to other urban districts.

In terms of their size and structure, the four campus sites belonging to the TU Braunschweig are comparable with inner-city urban districts with a diverse range of buildings that have different usages and ages, including lecture theatres, libraries, cafeterias, offices, laboratories, sheds and administrative buildings. In the first stage, the existing building stock comprising 145 buildings was documented and the buildings’ structural and energy characteristics were recorded in an energy register. Based on a district building typology, the researchers selected 19 suitable buildings for a detailed appraisal. Their results can be applied to other buildings of the same type and therefore extrapolated for the whole campus.

A major advantage is that the TU Braunschweig comprehensively records the energy consumption of the respective buildings to a high temporal resolution in accordance with the areas, uses and the development of future needs. A centrally operated energy management system enables the monitoring and control of the building services equipment, which is largely integrated into the system using building control technology. The partial energy characteristic values in the buildings can therefore be determined quickly and easily by installing metering and measurement equipment. These characteristic values provide an important basis for optimising the energy consumptions. As part of the „energy-oriented operation optimisation“ (EnBop) research initiative, these are being centrally recorded in a database by various research groups and can therefore also be used in campus-based projects. The TU Braunschweig’s building management is also supporting refurbishment measures such as the restructuring of the energy provision in the currently starting implementation phase.