The week before Christmas is a lecture-free week.

During this week, all colleagues who have their usual place of work in House 100 will be asked to work in the home office.

From this week until the beginning of the year, the heating in House 100 is in permanent night-time reduction, thus saving energy.

Dear employees,

Now that we have been able to gather some experiences on room temperatures and heating curves in connection with the energy issue, we would like to adjust our regulation on setting the "heating thermostats to level 5" communicated in the e-mail of 28 September 2022:

• For those rooms where it turns out that level 5 achieves too high a temperature, you can adjust the thermostat down. Preferably to level 2.
• This procedure then corresponds to the regulation communicated in the e-mail of 21 October 2022 concerning House 16 and Hall 17 and now applies to all buildings and rooms.
• Important: Please set the thermostat back to level 5 at the end of the day.
• This regulation will also be adjusted in the energy emergency plan.

Dear colleagues,
Dear students,

As announced by the President on 5 September, our university - and with it all of us - is called upon to save 30 per cent energy. To this end, an emergency energy plan has been drawn up, which envisages various robust measures to save energy: CLICK

We would like to highlight two points in particular for you:

1.     The start of the heating period is imminent. With the start of the heating period, we as a university will be in the first stage of the plan. The minimum and maximum temperature in all buildings and parts of the university will be set at 19 degrees Celsius, on the basis of a national regulatory ordinance (EnSikuMaV).

2.     The university management expects the assistance and personal responsibility of all members of the university. The thermostats on the radiators are set to level 5 at the beginning of the heating period. Please do not change this setting. The temperature target of 19 degrees Celsius is controlled centrally by the Building and Engineering Department via the supply temperature.

Therefore the individual radiators should be fully turned up to reach the maximum temperature.

For central regulation, a complete flow is necessary, and thus the heaters in the corridors should not be turned down either. This is necessary until further notice in order to keep the temperature in the heating system to approximately 19 degrees Celsius.

Further measures to be implemented on the students' own responsibility are described in the Emergency Plan for Energy and the Energy Etiquette.

The latest news from the TH Wildau on current energy issues can also be found on the the "Energy" page: https://en.th-wildau.de/energy

At THinsights (www.th-wildau.de/thinsights), news about energy will also be published this week and in the coming weeks.

We would also like to announce the next event in the series “Präsidium: Live” on 12 October from 14:30 to 15:30. Here you can talk to the President and the Chancellor on the subject of energy.

We thank you for your active cooperation and wish you a wonderful start to the semester and late summer/early autumn!

On behalf of the Crisis Team

Dear colleagues,
Dear students,

I hope you are all well and have enjoyed the summer and had a relaxing break. Now, on 1 September, the winter semester 22/23 has begun and we will soon start with courses. We also welcome many new students every autumn - and I am personally very much looking forward to the campus filling up with more and more life again.

In addition to the fact that we still have to keep an eye on the corona pandemic in connection with our teaching, there is currently another very difficult issue that affects us all: the energy problem connected with the war in Ukraine and the obligation to save energy also have an effect on universities, of course. We, too, are facing a challenge (30% energy savings - that's the target) and must prepare ourselves for the fact that the coming winter semester will also be anything but "a normal" semester.

The Brandenburg university administrations and the Ministry of Science, Research and Culture have therefore already agreed in recent weeks and months on how we will face this new challenge together. Among other things, we will continue to meet online on a weekly basis until further notice in order to be able to react quickly and in a coordinated manner to new situations. At the same time, we agree that we will do everything we can to ensure the best possible attendance at the universities. After more than two years of "corona operations" affecting many different aspects of university life, we see it as extremely important to promote face-to-face encounters and to maintain on-site learning. However, we must all be aware that on-site operations will be subject to significant restrictions in the coming weeks and months. We are currently finalising an emergency plan as well as an "energy etiquette", are preparing our own "energy website" with all relevant information, and have expanded our crisis team to include experts from the fields of building services and sustainability.

From now on, information on this will again be provided via the crisis team account krisenstab@th-wildau.de and I ask you to take very careful note of it. I also kindly ask you to send enquiries on this subject exclusively to this e-mail address as well.

I think we are all very clear: there will be challenging months ahead - both in our private lives and in terms of our university operations. As university leaders, we will set a framework that will enable the energy savings we are committed to. Beyond that, however, it is fundamental that we all "pull together" and that everyone acts and works very consciously and sparingly with regard to energy consumption in their respective environments. All energy costs are to be borne by the universities from their basic budget and we all know how prices are literally skyrocketing at the moment.

I would therefore like to thank you in advance for your cooperation and understanding, and despite everything, I am very confident that we will also overcome this challenge together.
In this spirit, I look forward to seeing you again on campus and send you all my warmest regards!

Yours, Ulrike Tippe