Exploitation of Mediterranean Cooperation Projects’ Tools for the Development of Public Buildings’ Energy Efficiency Plans at Local Level: A Case Study in Greece

Abstract

Ever since European Directive 2012/27/EU, particular attention has been focused on the improvement of the energy efficiency of the public building stock. According to the directive, local public authorities, regions and municipalities, are expected to develop and implement energy efficiency retrofitting plans for their public building stocks. While conducting such plans, important challenges are raised mainly related to data collection and the manipulation of key performance indicators (KPIs) for many buildings. The present paper deals with the aforementioned challenges through (a) the evaluation of freely available tools developed in the framework of Mediterranean territorial cooperation projects, with respect to the main pillars of energy efficiency planning, and (b) the introduction of a stepwise methodology using selected tools toward a reliable energy efficiency plan extending from the classification of the building stock to the prioritization of projects in terms of a gradual renovation plan based on energy and cost criteria. The methodology is applied for a case study in Greece, which refers to 10 public buildings of the Municipality of Aigialeia in Greece. A reliable renovation plan is developed, taking into account the municipal authority’s directions in a specialized decision-making scheme. It is concluded that the suggested methodology is very practical for planning purposes, while for the case studied, a 6-year gradual renovation plan is emerged until a deep retrofit of all buildings, associated with an estimated primary energy saving and CO2 emissions avoidance of more than 1850 MWh and 400 tns, respectively, with a total investment of about EUR 3 million.

Local Governance Support Tools for Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Adaptation Strategies: The EU Contribution in the Case Study of the Municipality of Naples

“…The project also aims to identify cost-effective approaches for energy renovation and use of public buildings, promoting ecological development (traditional use/social role), and producing short/long-term impacts on existing policy frameworks according to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agreements. During the course of the project, external experts were trained on the potential of these tools; the same experts then became the trainers of technicians and stakeholders for the various selected municipalities, such as the one in Aigialeia [21] or the one in Naples that is presented in this paper, promoting the dissemination, knowledge and implementation of the strategic plans.…”

Application of the Typology Approach for Energy Renovation Planning of Public Buildings’ Stocks at the Local Level: A Case Study in Greece

“…Following the bottom-up approach to produce the necessary KPI database, the archetype-based approach (or typology-based) is preferred over the building-by-building one especially for large building stocks [8,9]. Although the building-by-building approach provides more reliable building-stock modelling with a high granularity level which is the key to identifying energy-saving and renovation potential at high resolution, for large building stocks it is still very demanding in terms of computational resources and deskresearch work due to the need for building energy simulation for each building individually as well as for big data acquisition regarding the detailed technical features for each building [10].…”

“…An additional crucial component in building-stock energy planning is the prioritization of projects and the development of the optimal roadmap of renovation projects (gradual renovation of the building stock) taking into account the energy and financial performance indicators as well as the recommended annual renovation rate, particularly for public bodies' buildings [14]. This is interpreted as the determination of specific projects to be implemented annually [8].…”

“…The tools are successfully applied in ref. [8] for a case study regarding the development of a gradual renovation roadmap for a building stock of 10 public buildings of the Municipality of Aigialeia in Greece. Furthermore, the IMPULSE tools have been included in training sessions and have been recommended for further exploitation to conduct local energy efficiency planning [16].…”

“…Such methods, when unsupervised, often allow buildings with different key features to be included in the same typology simply because of the proximity among the (selected) dependent variable (usually the energy use intensity). Taking into account that in common planning practices the same renovation interventions are assumed for buildings of the same typology since they are fairly represented by one archetype or ambassador building [8,[22][23][24][25], an additional limitation for any (supervised) classification algorithm would be to ensure that buildings of the same cluster have similar key features, which are related to the energy interventions to be tested in a further step. For instance, if the replacement of an oil burner is included in the set of interventions tested for a typology, then all buildings of the same typology should have an oil burner for heating purposes in their existing situation.…”