The factory as power station

The Swiss Federal Council is seeking to make Switzerland climate-neutral by 2050. That’s not enough for Griesser’s CEO Urs Neuhauser: his company aims to be climate-neutral in its production by 2035. That calls for innovation in both architectural and technological terms: after all, the manufacture of the company’s aluminum solar shading components requires sizeable volumes of process energy, with temperatures of more than 200°C needed to apply the coatings involved. 

Even with processes such as these, though, strong eco-credentials can still be achieved, as Griesser is showing at its operating site in Nenzing in Austria’s Vorarlberg region. Here the Aadorf-based company has recently added a forward-looking wooden production hall – a 3 000-square-meter facility designed by Johannes Tiefenthaler that accommodates an advanced powder coating plant, an automated warehousing system and a center for distribution and dispatch. The new facility adjoins the existing building with its foyer, offices, product displays and training rooms that the company inherited through its acquisition of A.S.T. Alu-System-Technik GmbH in 2012.

Wood may not seem the obvious choice for a production hall’s construction: steel tends to be the preferred building material in the industrial sector, and Griesser also boasts a steel-built production hall next to the newly-extended building at its Nenzing site. Wood offers a host of advantages, though, as a building material. It shortens the construction time for one: local Vorarlberg builders took less than a year to erect and finish the new building using locally sourced wood. This in turn enabled Griesser to put the new hall into production sooner – a key plus point in economic terms. 

The wooden construction also proved useful when it came to installing the new powder coating facility in which the company’s aluminum window shutters are finished. “It was a totally new experience for our Swiss equipment supplier,” says Martin Barwart, Managing Director of Griesser Austria. “It was the first time they’d installed one of their plants within a wood construction. And they found they could attach all the equipment and suspension systems directly onto the building’s structure. The greater tolerances here compared to a steel building construction proved beneficial, too: we were able to easily make minor adjustments throughout the installation.” 

Does the choice of wood pose any higher threat or risk in fire safety terms, though? “Not at all,”  Barwart explains. “A fire in a steel building is actually a lot more dangerous, as I know from my own fire service experience. In a fire situation, a steel construction can suddenly fail, and has to be provided with extensive protective coatings to guard against this. A solid-wood element will withstand the flames far longer.”

Anyone entering the new Nenzing production hall with its huge laminated-timber trusses will immediately notice a further advantage of the use of this natural building material: wood automatically creates a pleasant spatial environment. While the ambient temperatures in the company’s adjacent steel construction can vary substantially, the new wooden hall is a comfortable place to be and work all year round. This is especially noticeable in summer: with its machinery generating sizeable waste heat and outside temperatures more likely to be high, working within a steel-built structure can swiftly become a substantial physical challenge. In a wood construction, by contrast, production can continue unencumbered. 

This in turn raises employees’ job satisfaction. “In the Vorarlberg,” Martin Barwart points out, “skilled specialist personnel are highly sought after, and there’s a lot of competition to attract the best talents. Since we opened our new wooden production hall, though, we’ve actually had such people asking us if we have any vacancies available. Working in a healthy and ecofriendly environment is clearly high among many people’s priorities.”

Its pleasant indoor environment and its impressive eco-credentials aren’t just attributable to the new hall’s construction materials. They’re also (and above all) the product of its sophisticated building technology. Existing resources are particularly well used. A 4 000-square-meter solar energy facility which is mounted on the building’s roof and eastern facade provides electricity for the machinery and the powder coating plant. This facility can generate up to 700 kWp – enough to cover 80 to 100 per cent of the building’s annual energy needs and supply several local electric car charging stations, too. If the site’s energy generation exceeds its energy needs, the surplus electricity is fed into the public grid. And should the operation be occasionally unable to meet its own energy needs, Griesser will buy-in only green energy to cover the temporary shortfall.

A further source of energy is provided by the coating plant itself. This produces sizeable volumes of waste heat. And this can be put to good further use via an extraction and heat pump system which can either heat or cool the building, according to need. The system’s heat pump is also used in the process of pre-heating product elements before they are coated – an application that cuts energy costs by no less than 25 per cent. And to effect even more energy savings, the actual coating process has been further developed and refined: the curing temperature has been lowered, which reduces energy costs by a further 10 per cent. Even wasteprocess water is used as a resource: the production hall has its own water treatment facility, and no waste water is discharged into any public wastewater network.

Griesser CEO Urs Neuhauser is as proud of the company’s new Nenzing expansion as Martin Barwart and his team. “In developing this new facility, we’re really underlining that our vision of climate-neutral production is a realizable objective,” Neuhauser explains. “We work climate-neutrally and we meet our own energy needs. Which is a massive achievement in engineering terms.”

The new Nenzing expansion marks a further milestone on Griesser’s environmental journey. The company, which has long made ecofriendly business and operating practices one of its prime corporate objectives and has been working closely with the myclimate environmental foundation since 2006, has already steadily converted its vehicle fleet to electrical power, and has also resolved to switch a sizeable part of its production to the use of ‘green aluminum’ which features a high recycled content and is manufactured using only green electricity. 

Rather than resting on its ecological laurels, Griesser is already working on further ways and means of making its business and operations even more sustainable. The company’s flagship factory at its Aadorf base in Eastern Switzerland additionally depends on biomass natural gas in the winter months. CEO Neuhauser now aims to work with architects and engineers to make further improvements in this area, too.