Topic Description

The construction sector is a key player in the efforts to decarbonise the European economy with the goal to drastically reduce energy consumption and decrease CO2 emissions. Key Performance Indicators, along with appropriate methodologies and tools are crucial in order to quantify and benchmark the energy-efficiency and the environmental quality at building and district level. Adequate monitoring and management techniques are also needed, mixing results and practices from the building sector together with other relevant sectors like energy grid to ensure an effective performance improvement both at building and district level.

Proposals should focus on solutions beyond the state of the art, which will improve and provide a feedback on the experiences on energy efficiency and environmental quality from the latest generation of new and renovated buildings and their interactions in districts.

Proposals should focus on the following main objectives:

• To establish a consolidated structured and geo-clustered analysis and compilation of the latest generation buildings and their interaction with district resources in order to develop the return of experience associated with them,
• To identify and analyse relevant sectorial indicators, development of models providing insight in data and that will enable and support decision making for energy efficiency and environmental quality, from design to operational phases,
• To elaborate and develop operational and harmonised protocols supporting tools and systems to characterize the performances in real operational conditions,
• To develop benchmarks on the impact of the non-qualities on the overall energy performance, which protect privacy while allowing deep analysis,
• To understand the specific causes of non-performance or sub-optimal performance throughout the entire life cycle (from design to construction and operation) and promoting best practices to the industry.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU between EUR 500000 and 750000 would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

No more than one action will be funded.

• Setting up more accurate guidance for all types of building that can be used by design teams, in particular for the public procurement of innovative solutions. This accurate guidance should match actual building operation more closely;
• Collecting Europe-wide data and knowledge on the effective performance of new and renovated buildings of the latest generation;
• Developing scientific and technical databases which should be robust and shared to objectify and characterize performance in situ. This database should also allow the comparison between forecasts and reality, and detail the need to change practices;
• Statistical and knowledge analyses enabling to reach consensus on how to bridge the gap between performances expected at the design level and performances really obtained.