Z43 Goes Carbon Dioxide-Free

As part of our effort to help create a sustainable and healthier future, energy at Z43 is now 100% renewable, which will lead to a reduction in CO₂ emissions of more than 60,000 m³ per year – corresponding to about twenty times the CO₂ footprint of the average Swiss.

For the past 20 years, we have produced the heating energy for the Z43 headquarters in Zurich – home to the IT’IS Foundation, Schmid & Partner Engineering AG, and ZMT Zurich MedTech AG – as well as supplied adjacent residential buildings with more than 79 apartments with natural gas. Our labs, on the other hand, were cooled via a small heat pump powered by electricity. Though gas is “cleaner” than oil or coal, we strongly felt that it was time to switch from fossil fuels to renewable sources of power in order to run our work lives more sustainably.

So we finally got rid of the gas burners in our basement and invested heavily in a new energy system. The newly installed 500 kW heat pump now heats and cools the various buildings by exchanging heat with the groundwater stream that runs 30 m below our premises. In addition, because our labs and servers produce more heating energy than we can use during the summer, we replaced the warm-water panels on the roof with photovoltaic cells to generate our electric power. We also took care to only subscribe to companies that exclusively generate electricity by hydro, wind, and solar power. This complements our internal policy that Z43 staff should only commute by car to work in exceptional circumstances (e.g., it was appropriate to do so during the COVID-19 pandemic).

We are proud that we have started to generate our own energy and have become largely CO₂-free at Z43.

Curious how it looks? Check out our CO₂-free energy production by clicking on the leaf:

The leaf can also be found in the header of any of our webpages: IT’IS Foundation, SPEAG, ZMT, and Zurich43.

Z43 – Think Renewable!