Analysis of Energy Retrofit Assessment Methodologies in Buildings by European Research Projects

Abstract

Energy retrofit of existing buildings is one of the main keys to achieve European Union’s decarbonising objectives defined in the European Green Deal. In order to proceed into them, European policy has been adapted and several research projects are developed. The aim of this paper is to analyse the assessment methodology of the research projects, setting up the overview of the assessed fields and the criteria followed to perform and evaluate each project. As working methodology, 18 projects have been studied, firstly characterising by the main parameters and afterwards analysing the assessment followed by each one. This analysis is decomposed into five parameters: the assessment scope, reflecting the fields covered by the project’s assessment; data source, the nature of the data; verification, use of data verification strategies; and implementation of life cycle thinking in the assessment methodology. The research shows that although the projects have their bases in the EU energetic targets they also cover a wider scope, assessing many fields and combining many sources of data. However, despite the large knowledge already defined by many projects, there is a lack of global and complete roadmap to be followed.

Building Refurbishment – Approaching Sustainability in a European Context: Case Study of Oradea City, Romania

“…Also another challenge in implementing the European Green Deal is seen in the diversity and division among the member states regarding the climate policies (Haas & Sanders, 2020;Dupont & Torney, 2021). The objectives, measures, and policies implied by the European Green Deal concern several aspects already researched by academics, such as agriculture (Montanarella & Panagos, 2021;Bartolome et al, 2022), building refurbishments (Pohoryles et al, 2020Napoli et al, 2020;Arbulu et al, 2021;Buckley et al, 2021;Loli & Bertolin, 2021), technology (Hainsch et al, 2021), transport (Hass & Sander, 2020, urban tourism (Popescu et al, 2022), regional development (Piontek, 2020) and economic recovery (García Vaquero et al, 2021;Kougias et al, 2021;Bongardt & Torres, 2022), etc. Building refurbishments, as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to reduce resources consumptions for heating, triggered our attention towards renovating residential flats.…”

Applicability of the European Union’s Building Renovation Assessment Framework in Spain

“…This study is part of the research project LOCAL-REGEN, where previous studies have been conducted on the assessment frameworks of European research and technological development (RTD) projects [3], as well as on the barriers and challenges of the MPIs within the assessment framework of the Commission Recommendation (EU) 2019/786 [2], by analysing their concordance with the evaluation framework of European RTD projects [4]. This second study found low data availability and reliability as the main barriers, along with the need to prioritize and shortlist the large amount of MPIs [4].…”