Research

Energy costs, particularly in the form of electricity, are playing an increasingly important economic role on farms due to the rise in energy prices. As electricity prices will remain at a higher level in the future, but above all become more volatile than before, the economic price risk for farms is increasing. On the other hand, security of supply has increasingly become the focus of social discourse. Due to Austria's high dependency on imported energy sources, this leads to an increasing risk in the security of supply. One form of risk management can be to make the farm as energy self-sufficient as possible. The possibilities for this have become more diverse due to the further development of renewable energy technologies and the investment decision for farms is often associated with great economic uncertainty. This project aims to evaluate the technologies available on the market (in the field of solar power production, storage and use) and operational development paths (flexibilisation measures in efficiency and load management) with regard to energy self-sufficiency from a technical and economic perspective and to survey their acceptance among farm managers. In addition to surveys on motives for such investment decisions and attitudes towards energy self-sufficiency and risk perception, high-resolution energy simulation and business risk assessment models will be developed and applied to typical farms in Austrian agriculture. From this, an Excel tool will be developed to support the work of agricultural advisors and thus make a significant contribution to the development of more sustainable structures in agriculture.

Digital data processing and the possibilities of data and knowledge management have massively changed the way we work in daily life. Whereas previously all information had to be recorded manually on paper, the information and communication technologies (ICT) allow a largely automated documentation and processing of the data necessary for the daily work process. The opportunities that this ultimately opens up for agriculture must be seized at all costs in order not to lose touch with international developments. The foundation of the platform "Digitisation in Agriculture" in 2017 has taken this challenge into account. The report of the same name, published in November 2018, not only described the state of development, but above all proposed a number of measures that could contribute to the further development and benefit of new technologies in agriculture. The planned project takes up the objectives set out in the cluster call with a comprehensive package of measures. On the one hand, the project aims to make the new technological developments more visible to farmers (Project II). In further sub-projects, solutions for simplifying extension services and farm management (project III) as well as concepts for simplified assessment of environmental impacts with the help of new technologies (project V) are to be developed. A general, extremely sensitive and important topic is the legal framework conditions, which will be analysed in Project IV and presented in the form of illustrative use cases. These extensive tasks can only be dealt with through the cooperation of experienced and competent experts and institutions. The new and innovative approach in the cluster project represents the bundling of the competences of the most important actors in the field of digitisation in agriculture. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

The building materials industry faces major challenges in terms of the energy, emissions and resource savings required to achieve the climate targets. Measures to replace fossil fuels in the resource- and energy-intensive construction sector are not enough to achieve comprehensive decarbonisation. The long-term material use of wood in buildings is a building block for achieving climate neutrality in the building sector and it has been shown that timber construction can be a measure to mitigate climate change. An increase from the current 22% to 50% wood (residential) construction (Wood Construction Share) would require an additional wood input into the construction industry of 0.5 million m3 or up to 1 million m3 per year in a scenario with high wood utilisation in order to cover the increasing demand if no measures are taken to extend the service life of buildings and increase recycling. At the same time, the amount of waste wood from deconstruction will increase in the coming decades and therefore represents a growing potential for reuse and recycling from 2050 onwards if various technical, economic and regulatory obstacles can be overcome. Current political strategies and measures in terms of climate protection reinforce the need for innovations along the entire product life cycle and the value chain in the construction sector in order to realise the potential of the recyclability of construction products. Specifically