Energy

At our head office in Dübendorf and as a large-scale consumer, we are obliged by the canton of Zurich to make energy savings of 2% a year. Helsana has also concluded a voluntary target agreement with the Energy Agency of the Swiss Private Sector (EnaW) and has also included its four other main locations in St. Gallen, Worblaufen, Lausanne and Bellinzona in addition to its head office in Dübendorf. An engineering firm identified energy and CO₂ reduction measures for all five main sites and worked with Helsana to draw up an implementation plan. This results not only in optimised energy consumption, but also in a potential CO₂ reduction of around 12% by 2030.

We have already implemented the following measures under this target agreement:

• Optimised lighting – switch to LED and controlled operating hours
• LED replacements for floor lamps in St. Gallen, Lausanne, Bellinzona and Stettbach
• Provision of six electric vehicles for employees – for example for customer visits
• Electric charging stations for employees’ personal use at the St. Gallen, Lausanne and Stettbach sites
• Replacement of the building management system in Bellinzona to optimise and better control building technology systems
• Optimisation of individual operating hours of the ventilation systems

Staying on track with our energy monitoring system

Since 2021, we have been collecting energy figures by requesting utility bills from the authorities and using the electricity bills we have received directly. This procedure is no longer up to date, is prone to errors and does not allow continuous monitoring of the key indicators. This prompted us to introduce an energy monitoring system in 2023 that will be expanded in 2024 to include automated energy meters for our five major locations. The energy data – and benchmarks – for these properties can then be accessed at any time. In the reporting year, we could therefore lay the foundation for better monitoring our energy consumption in the future and for systematically exploiting the potential for further energy optimisation. Total energy consumption in the reporting year came to 9,071 MWh, while the energy intensity was 52.4 kWh/m² for electricity and 85.4 kWh/m² for heating. The majority of our total energy consumption within the company comes from fuel consumption for the heating system, which accounts for 58.7%, and electricity consumption, which makes up 38.2%.