News

The most sustainable brick production within the Wienerberger Group is being built in Uttendorf: After years of collaboration with the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology, the NEFI project "GreenBricks" is now launching, which is supported by the Austrian Climate and Energy Fund as part of the FTI initiative "Vorzeigeregion Energie".

On January 25, 2023, the new NEFI project AHEAD (Advanced Heat Pump Demonstrator) was presented in Vienna. in collaboration with the biopharmaceutical company Takeda, the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation, and Technology (BMK), the Climate and Energy Fund, and the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology.

Under the leadership of the AIT Center for Energy, a steam-generating heat pump is being integrated for the first time in an industrial operation. The aim of this natural gas-free steam generation is to achieve a CO₂ reduction of up to 90 percent at one of Takeda's largest pharmaceutical production sites in Vienna, using only natural refrigerants.

The final consortium meeting of the NEFI project Clean Energy for Tourism took place from 19-20 September 2022. In this project, Salzburg ski resorts, as well as technology and research partners such as the AIT, BEST, Faradis, World Direct, Sattler Energie Consulting and the Montanuniversität Leoben, led by Salzburg AG, investigated opportunities for applying energy system flexibility, CO₂ mitigation options - as well as energy savings, in addition to the increasing the amount of integration of local renewable energy generation in ski resorts.

The energy transition is also a heat transition, and this aspect has hardly been talked about so far. Since the beginning of the year, the energy crisis has brought this challenge into the public sphere. Five keynotes highlighted the possibilities of how heating and cooling networks can be decarbonised with the help of geothermal energy and industrial waste heat at this NEFI Talk .