Beyond Zero speaks to architect Erhard Rathmayr about sustainable technologies applied on facades of buildings

Beyond Zero's Matthew Wright speaks to the architect Erhard Rathmayr about heliopan, integrating solar thermal into buildings, and discusses sustaianble building overall.

www.heliopan.com.au

Beyond Zero speaks to Erhard Rathmayr

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Transcript

Matthew Wright : We are lucky to have Erhard Rathmayr on the line. He's an architect and as i said from Heliopan, and Heliopan is a very interesting company doing a solar thermal solutions, and integrating that with buildings. Hello are you there Erhard?

Erhard Rathmayr: Yes and good morning.

Matthew Wright : Good morning, you are speaking to the beyond zero show on 3CR community radio network and broadcast around Australia on the community radio network. Now can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became interested in renewable energy and in solar integration in buildings?

Erhard Rathmayr: Yes. Being trained as an architect in Austria it was kind of part of our education that we were trained in sustainability. So during university we did some projects, specifically I did a project on an alpine hotel, which was obviously cut off the grid, we're we had to demonstrate how this could be done sustainably in regards to energy waste management and all these factors which are more and more important these days.

Matthew Wright : And so you said that you were from Austria, and obviously you moved here. I understand that you are in Queensland, how long have you been in Australia?

Erhard Rathmayr: It's been nine years now and I really enjoy it.

Matthew Wright : And you're working in an architectural practice here in Australia?

Erhard Rathmayr: Yes I do run a small boutique practice and this is the minor part of my business and besides this I do Heliopan.

Matthew Wright : And tell us a bit about Heliopan, how you came to find this product and why you decided to bring it to Australia?

Erhard Rathmayr: In one of my longer stays in Austria I came across Heliopan Austria, and the head company is basically located about seventy kilometres west of where I grew up. So when I went to meet them I immediately knew that this was something that was absolutely in line with what I wanted to do, what I was thinking about for a long time. When you see it just makes a lot of sense the way it's done.

It's an illusion which you would think that that would be in the market for a long time now. And the Austrian head company had so much success in Austria that it's actually looking for people to market the product in other countries, and Australia, it was one of the main priorities. I get on very very well along with the people in charge of the head company, so it was kind of a click that this is what I wanted to do.

Matthew Wright : And the product in Austria, what sort of application, what sort of successful applications have they installed to date?

Erhard Rathmayr: At the moment there is applications in Austria, in Croatia, and in Germany. Obviously Austria and Germany are the colder countries, so a lot of the applications are doing predominately the heating of buildings and providing hot water for usage. But in Croatia we do solar cooling and in Austria we do solar cooling as well, which means we use the energy generated by the sun to chill the buildings.

Erhard Rathmayr: And in terms of the products as a heater, how does the application compare when the products installed in Australia and our climate versus Austria?

Erhard Rathmayr: Basically in Australia we have about double the irradiation of Austria and we have way more sun now then we have in Austria, so we achieve about three times the yield of Austria. I'm quite often asked how we would perform here in Australia in regards to pay back. What we achieve is that obviously energy would be more expensive in Europe, by about a third, even a little bit more in some countries, but because we have three times the yield we actually expect better pay back periods here in Australia, then we do overseas.

Matthew Wright : Well in that case why do you think that products like this haven't taken off as quickly in Australia, given that we have higher solar yield, and therefore better pay backs?

Erhard Rathmayr: On reason, things are a little bit more difficult here is that there are more government grants and subsidies in Europe. Specifically in countries like Germany, Austria, Switzerland and perhaps northern Italy and that's one reason why those features are very popular there.

Another reason is there is coal and gas very cheaply available here, and I guess one answer is what I have observed in Australia is that when people get aware of it, it sort of goes very quickly. This happened with solar P.V when I think about five or six years back from today it was not as common as it is today. So I think that maybe Australia is not in the forefront when those technologies get ready for the market. But once people get aware, it usually goes fairly quickly.

Matthew Wright : Let's just ask a little bit about the products, so we can describe it to the listeners. We're talking about a solar thermal system, in this case, what we call a low temperature solar thermal system, so one that you can integrate into buildings and the built form. Can you give us an idea of how the product, what it actually achieves and what it looks like.

Erhard Rathmayr: Well solar thermal collector, basically is a solar hot water collector. And the product we are putting onto the market is basically like the Ferrari of solar hot water heaters. It is designed similar to a double glazed window; just the rear sheet of glass is replaced by our absorber.

And it can be technically explained as a water mix running through this absorber. And this absorber is fully building integrated, which means it sit in a curtain wall or aluminium glazing facade and then it's piped into a tank with a heat exchanger. So the system, it’s a fairly simple system. The knowledge is basically in the actual collected which is a very sleek element. It's only 40mm thick and from the external, when it's sitting in the facade of the building you wouldn't even recognise it.

Usually when you look at other collectors, they would be sitting as an add on, onto a building. While our collector is fully building integrated, this has quite a few advantages. It’s cheaper because we replace, basically, a part of the building shell, which means wherever our collector sits, something else can be taken out of the cost of construction. And for the architects obviously it preferable simply because it's becoming an integral part of the building, it's becoming a design feature of the building.

Matthew Wright : We are talking to Erhard Rathmayr and he is from Heliopan Australia, Helipan Energy Facade Systems, it's an Austrian system that's been now offered now in Australia and he's an architect. And being an architect Erhard, you were obviously attracted to this particular solution because you felt that it could actually be a feature, or certainly not be a difficulty for architects.

Erhard Rathmayr: That's correct, yes. Most collectors usually have to have what’s called an ideal black in solar terms. Our collector can basically can have whatever colour we want, we can apply texture to it, we can, on a large scale application, we an apply graphics.

So it offers a lot of room for architects to be playful, to design the building with various options. And particularly usually the western facade of a building is very tricky because the openings have to be shaded to prevent it from overheating. Well this collector actually takes this as a challenge and gives a lot of opportunity and freedom to the designer.

Matthew Wright : Now can you tell us a little bit about some of the technical offerings, the P.V, thermal, shade, you know all the different options.

Erhard Rathmayr: Yes. Well basically we can provide the solar thermal collector which can be used for cooling, heating or for hot water. This basically has double the performance of the best P.V collector on the market and up to about fifty degree tilt angle of a ideal orientation, it doesn't lose any performance compared to a P.V. which usually fits further than 40-50 degrees off the ideal angle loses a lot of performance.

So performance wise this is probably our best product. But then we can offer a hybrid collector as well. So our hybrid collector has the combination of a P.V into solar thermal. It works in a way that the solar thermal collector would cool the PV element therefore it enhances the performance of the PV and at the same time produces hot water. We then do make as well building integrated photo voltaic, which is called BI PV. With these BI PV we do both monocrystaline and polycrystalline.

With the monocrystaline, we apply simple windows, were we have a specific product which can be completely transparent, so it's almost completely unnoticeable that there is a PV in the glass. But we can also do it with coloured glass as well, so we have come together with our French partner several products in France, where you have windows which have colours and that gives them a very impressive look inside and outside.

And we do it together, we do collect with, polycrystalline elements and by the way we space the monocrystalline itself, we then can actually design the shading accordingly to the needs of the building. So there is a lot of options.

Matthew Wright : And are these options already deployed in Europe?

Erhard Rathmayr: Yes, we did test, there are quite a few projects in Europe we have done, together with our French partner, some interesting BI PV projects and we have obviously done the BI PV project ourselves in Europe.

Matthew Wright : And back to the thermal collector on its own , can you tell a bit about exciting examples in Europe of an installation, what it looks like what sort of building and what it's achieving.

Erhard Rathmayr: Yes we have done a building in Austria, which you might know Swarovski the glass manufacturer. They had a building in Austria in Tirol which was structurally glazed. They had some thermal issues, it had condensation problems.

So we basically did a refurb. We took the old facade off and put our product on which is a structural glazing facade and the building used before, so geo-thermal co-generation system together with a gas heater. Our system basically has replaced the gas heater and together with the geo-thermal back up. It now cuts the building completely of using fossil fuels.

So this building doesn't use any fossil energy for heating or cooling and that’s quite a substantial result. But usually, I mean this is an extreme building usually we achieve about seventy percent of energy savings, which means seventy percent of carbon reductions, carbon output reductions.

Matthew Wright : And would that be a greater factor in Australia, than in Austria, or is that just the figure here for Australia?

Erhard Rathmayr: I think it could be a greater factor in Australia simply because we usually do more heat insulation on buildings in Australia than what Australia is doing at the moment. So this element we are marketing as fantastic R values or U values in some countries call them.

So it insulates the building better and it would in Australia as well work better, because if we do solar cooling the cycles of when you need to cool the most and when you have the most energy delivered by the sun go together. But in Europe we have the most energy delivered by the sun during summer but you need the most energy in the winter for heating.

So we would consider to have specifically with solar cooling would have a better result here in Australia. We are actually doing a project together with a very modern engineering firm to most likely do the project here in Queensland early next year.

Matthew Wright : And what sort of projects are you targeting in Queensland, are they like hospital size, or school size ,or large building or small domestic?

Erhard Rathmayr: Basically it could be any. In a small domestic, solar cooling might get to expensive because the components for the plant quite expensive. But the smaller projects it's more for hot water. Medium to large size we would target both. We’re working on a hospital at the moment were we would do 50,000 litres of solar hot water every day. I'm working on a hotel we do all the hot water for about fifty hotel rooms. We could do swimming pool heating, hot water for high residential towers. So the field application is a very large one.

Matthew Wright : And are there any innovations coming alone, is the company developing any new products?

Erhard Rathmayr: Yes there is. Basically there are two innovations in the pipe lines now. The collector we use now is what is called standard collector, which means it doesn't go higher than a hundred degrees higher in water. Our highly selective collector at the moment is only available in darker colours. In about four to five months time it will be available in the lighter colours as well.

But the better product will be an evaporative tube collected that is building integrated, so we are working on a collector that again is only 35-40mm wide and that has evaporative tubes and can be building integrated into again. And this will have 50-55% efficiency. Compared to, just to give you figures, the solar thermal at the moment has about 38-40% efficiency and BI PV element has no more than 20% efficiency at the moment.

Matthew Wright : So are you saying that the evaporative tube run will be a hybrid of the two, or just a thermal solution ?

Erhard Rathmayr: This will be just a thermal solution this is a really high end solar collector.

Matthew Wright : And you can see the market may move in this direction or this will be just a boutique product?

Erhard Rathmayr: The market will move in this direction. We think that the cost effective collector and the evaporative collectors will be even more tolerate to the angle of the sun, so the yield will be much better and the market is basically ready for that kind of solution, it's just in the current situation there is basically no competitor for us, so we are going to the market.

We show people something that hasn't been done before and there are several objectives or a cautious mind need to be convinced that this really works and I'm fairly confident that by early to mid next year we'll have the first project here in Australia that will be built and then we can demonstrate for a wider range of people that it works and it will just develop over time. That's exactly what we experienced in Europe as well.

Matthew Wright : Now on the architecture front and sustainability energy, do you think it would be useful in Australia if architects had a bigger concentration on sustainable energy systems in their training courses?

Erhard Rathmayr: Absolutely, and I think there is more and more happening. I mean I'm talking to various people who are tutoring here at the uni of Queenland and I think that the next generation of architects will be much more aware then the current situation.

I think that one quality of Australia that changes can happen quickly and a better training at University would be helpful. It is basically, I mean if you bring it in at an early stage people don't have to get skilled when they are in the work force and it just makes sense.

Matthew Wright : Ok Erhard, I'm going to have to leave you there Erhard, could you please give our listeners our address if they wish to find out more.

Erhard Rathmayr: Yes of course www.heliopan.com.au and on our web page is all the information about it .