The European Union 2050 climate neutrality goal and the climate crisis require coordinated efforts to reduce energy consumption in all sectors, and mainly in buildings greatly affected by the increasing temperature, with relevant CO2 emissions due to inefficient end-use technologies. Moreover, the old building stock of most countries requires suited policies to support renovation programs aimed at improving energy performances and optimize energy uses. A toolbox was developed in the framework of the PrioritEE project to provide policy makers and technicians with a wide set of tools to support energy efficiency in Municipal Public Buildings. The toolbox, available for free, was tested in the partners’ communities, proving its effectiveness. The paper illustrates its application to the Potenza Municipality case study in which the online calculator DSTool (the core instrument of the toolbox) was utilized to select and prioritize the energy efficiency interventions in public buildings implementable in a three-year action plan in terms of costs, energy savings, CO2 emissions’ reduction and return on investments. The results highlight that improvements in the building envelopes (walls and roofs), heating and lighting and photovoltaic systems allow reducing CO2 emission approximately 644 t/year and saving about 2050 MWh/year with a total three-year investment of 1,728,823 EUR.

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In 2018 across 885 urban areas of the EU-28 only 66% of EU cities have, according to Reckien et al. classification a A1 (autonomously produced plans), A2 (plans produced to comply with national regulations) or A3(plans developed for international climate net- works) mitigation plan, 26% an adaptation plan, and 17% a joint adaptation and mitigation plan, while about 33% lack any form of stand-alone local climate plan [ 1 ]. Local climate plans are a new emerging field of application for urban planning and, in this sector appropriate geovisualization techniques could be useful tool in supporting make decisions about actions for local energy and climate plans. Geovisualization can help decision makers or researchers to transfer information to stakeholders and people. In this work we discuss geovisualization approach for energy consumptions and renovation scenarios for private and public buildings delivered in a specific case study: Potenza Municipality. This tool allows to visualize energy consumptions at urban scale thorough a geo- database including individual buildings information with several functions: i.e. to identify urban areas where take action with higher priority. The application to case study of Potenza Municipality is a component of a wider process of developing the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP). It shows the potential of geovisualization as a tool to support decisions making and monitoring of actions to be included in the plan.

This is a reply to the paper by Miroslav Variny [...]