Products and Customers

Bosch offers its customers energy-efficient solutions in all its divisions – from modern heating systems and energy-saving cooling appliances to lawnmowers that have a 20 times better energy balance than conventional gasoline-powered mowers.

The EU estimates that primary energy consumption in residential buildings alone can be cut by 27 percent by 2020. In total, private households and small-scale users are responsible for 19 percent of Europe’s CO₂ emissions. That is around the same as the amount produced by traffic. The share generated by industrial production processes is 16 percent.

There are a number of ways to save energy in buildings – from heat insulation and more efficient heating systems to using renewable energy. Using a condensing boiler combined with a solar thermal system for heating drinking water and supporting the heating system generates 60 percent less CO₂ than a 30-year-old heating system.

A new patented range of regulators, which the Bosch brand Junkers unveiled in 2007, optimizes the interaction between gas condensing boilers and solar collectors. The system registers how much solar energy is available for generating hot water and informs the heater. Innovative ideas like this system of constant regulation can help save up to 15 percent extra energy. With heating systems, several renewable sources of energy, such as wood and solar energy, can be used in combination. In Germany, 40 percent of the new heating systems installed in 2006 run on renewable energies. In Europe, this figure is 17 percent.

Compared with 1990, the energy consumption of Bosch household appliances has fallen by as much as 79 percent for refrigerators and by up to 40 percent for ovens, washing machines, and dishwashers. However, if these potential energy savings are to be manifested as an actual reduction in CO₂ then these new technologies must also become established in the market. The average age of the appliances in European households is still ten years. There are some 188 million old appliances throughout Europe today. If these were replaced with new highly-efficient appliances, we could save as much as 22 million metric tons of CO₂ a year. This equates to around six percent of the reduction in greenhouse gases agreed to by the European Union in the Kyoto Protocol.

In the U.S., Bosch has focused its marketing and communication activities on energy efficiency with a “Green Appliances” campaign. Bosch is currently the only manufacturer in the U.S. that meets the requirements of the “ENERGY STAR” program in all its product lines and household appliance models.

The Technical University in Darmstadt was the only German university to qualify along with 19 other entrants for the Solar Decathlon, a prestigious international architecture competition run by the U.S. Department of Energy. The task was to plan and build a house powered entirely by solar energy. The house by the architecture students from Darmstadt won the competition. Bosch Thermotechnology supported the project from the beginning – both financially and through technical support on issues such as the solar thermal system, heat pumps, and control technology.

Of the ten disciplines in the competition, the solar house achieved the highest marks in the energy balance category and ranked first in the categories architecture, lighting, and engineering. Other disciplines focused on using energy-efficient household appliances, an area where Bosch was also on-hand to help with its highly efficient products.