INSIDE VIEW OF A KOMMISSAR

It happened in 1996. Back then, I was studying at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and didn’t really know what I wanted to do with my life. I only knew one thing for certain: I definitely did not want to become a civil engineer, which is pretty stupid when you are studying civil engineering.

At the time, I was almost thirty years old and had already completed vocational training as an electrical appliance mechanic and industrial electronics technician for energy equipment. As a child, I had grown up in my parents’ agricultural contracting business. Until I was 25, I therefore spent my holidays on combine harvesters, mowing fields.

These experiences in a small-scale farming environment shaped me so strongly that one thing was clear: industry was not my world. So first I obtained my university of applied sciences entrance qualification. After a subsequent two-year episode as a construction and service electrician, I more or less accidentally started studying civil engineering in 1994. Two years later, I had completed the foundation course and was certain that I was stuck in a dead end.

That was an unpleasant time. I wasn’t really doing well, and not because I hadn’t been partying enough. But all that partying could not fill the emptiness in my head. The uncertainty about what I should do with my life was eating away at me.

And then it happened. It was on a Sunday evening, on a train journey from Cologne back home. My girlfriend was studying in Cologne. We only saw each other every few weeks on weekends. That weekend was one of those times. But on Sunday evening it was time to go home again. As I often was after such visits, I was in a foul mood. In that moment, I found the whole world simply unbearable.

And then it happened. I passed Frankfurt by train. The whole city and the skyline lay before me. Everything was brightly illuminated. A huge, never-ending sea of lights. It was actually beautiful to look at, but in my bad mood I asked myself why on earth everything was so brightly lit. Does it really have to be that way? Couldn’t an incredible amount of energy and resources be saved by using light in a more targeted and economical way?

At that very moment, an avalanche of questions was triggered in my head and the energy virus had infected me. I did not yet know that I would never get rid of the virus. Of course, it was impossible to foresee what would develop from it. But today I know that this was the moment when the ENERGIESPARKOMMISSAR was born.

From that moment on, I wanted to know why the lights in Frankfurt were burning so brightly, where the electricity for them came from, how power plants were organized, and so on. As soon as I got home, I began researching, reading and educating myself further. From then on, I used my studies to attend every course that had even the slightest connection to the topic of energy. At our local school, I offered elective courses on renewable energy and saving energy. Back then, I soaked up energy, inhaled energy, and gradually even built up my own small energy-saving library.

A significant part of my library at the time consisted of publications by the Institute for Housing and Environment (IWU) in Darmstadt. In the 1990s, the energy department was one of the first addresses when it came to energy research for residential buildings. A former IWU employee had already founded the Passive House Institute at that time. The employees and authors of the many IWU studies on my bookshelf were among my personal heroes back then. For me, Darmstadt was therefore the Mecca of building energy efficiency at the end of the 1990s. I felt like I was at the center of the universe and had finally found the connection between my personal interests and my studies. All of that felt like a liberation to me.

In 2000, I applied to the IWU for a practical semester alongside my studies. I received not only an internship, but also a work contract right away. For Darmstadt’s ecological rent index, hundreds of energy balances for buildings had to be created. Since the most time-consuming task was determining the window areas, I was asked to develop a simplified statistical estimation method for window areas.

I was thrilled. I had a position at the IWU and a cool assignment. I was full of enthusiasm and got started. I researched the literature for sources of building datasets that were suitable for evaluating window areas. Then I got on the phone and managed to collect more than 800 usable datasets. My supervisors at the IWU rubbed their eyes in disbelief, and I received the next work contract. The results of my first scientific work later flowed into the simplified data collection used for creating energy performance certificates. They are still in there today. If you ever need the window area of a house and are too lazy to measure, just take the living space times 20%. It is almost always right.

After a few work contracts at the IWU, I also wrote my diploma thesis there and completed my studies. The topic of the diploma thesis: Energy renovation concept for a listed half-timbered house. During an intensive six months, I was able to sharpen and expand my knowledge of building physics and the topic of internal insulation.

Afterwards, I was taken on by a subdepartment of the IWU, the Impulsprogramm Hessen (later Hessische Energiespar-Aktion). There, I was able to gain my first experience in public relations work on the topic of energy efficiency in buildings. However, due to funding cuts by the Koch government at the time, this episode lasted only 14 months.

Although I applied to the German Energy Agency (dena) and BAFA at the time, I was actually so deeply rooted in southern Hesse that relocating was out of the question. But since there were no positions in and around Darmstadt that matched what I wanted to do, I decided to become self-employed as an independent energy consultant. My office ENERGIE & HAUS has now existed since 2004.