EPBD Implementation: Smartness for Energy Efficiency

Building energy efficiency is not only about the quality of the insulation materials and the intrinsic performance of the building’s technical systems like heating, ventilation, and lighting. How the building managers and occupants use them is crucial to achieving energy savings and other benefits, such as improved air quality and comfort. The capacity of buildings to contribute to the flexibility of the energy system is another challenge that buildings must meet, in particular when they are equipped with electric vehicle charging spots which should ideally be used to help balancing the electricity system instead of aggravating consumption peaks.

In the era of digitalisation of energy systems, the Internet of things, and artificial intelligence, users are not alone in managing buildings smartly. This is why the energy performance of buildings directive of the European Union (EPBD) heavily emphasises the potential of smart technologies in the building sector, to improve both energy efficiency and the well-being of people. EPBD thus introduced the concept of a “Smart Readiness Indicator” (SRI) supplementing the existing energy performance certificates (EPC): the SRI is a common EU framework for rating the smart readiness of buildings.

This workshop provides a glimpse into several innovative tools under development allowing building owners, managers, occupants, assessors, and other stakeholders of energy efficiency to evaluate and improve the performance and the smartness of a building from different perspectives.

In doing so, this session aims to tackle three challenges: 

1. Dispersion of information: When tools are developed by several projects simultaneously, they may become harder for stakeholders to find and track. This workshop aggregates them and provides a comprehensive overview of the available solutions for smarter buildings.

2. Apparent overlapping: As all the tools presented in this workshop address the same field of knowledge (smart buildings), they may look very similar to the untrained eye; however, they are complementary rather than overlapping. This workshop explains what each solution offers to each user, clarifying interactions.

3. Blurred focus: Solutions for smarter buildings often focus on a challenge and/or on a specific context of use. This leaves users no other choice than to look for specific solutions to specific problems, one at a time. This workshop aims to accelerate this time-consuming task by shifting the focus to the energy efficiency personas: for each persona, a set of relevant tools will be pitched in bulk.

Contributing projects:

• REHVA
• EasySRI
• SRI2MARKET
• SmarterEPC
• Smart Square
• Masterpiece
• tunES
• SRI-ENACT

Speakers:

Pablo Carnero Melero, REHVA – María Fernandez Boneta, CENER – Paraskevas Koukaras, CERTH – Paris Fokaides, Euphyia – Apostolis Arsenopoulos, NTUA – Georg Vogt, EMP – Cécile Barrere, R2M Solution– Habib Nasser, RDIUP