Advanced energy performance assessment and certification

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Improved construction quality and service life compliance.
• Improved accuracy of energy performance assessment and any other assessment conducted in parallel, reduced gap between assessment and actual performance.
• Improved and automated monitoring of energy performance of buildings, and other relevant life-cycle performance aspects with a direct link to the energy efficiency performance.
• Improved user-friendliness of Energy Performance Certificates and post-occupancy performance data, in terms of clarity, accuracy, trade-offs and usability of the information provided.
• Increased uptake of design standards and practices based on actual performance.
• More reliable understanding of energy and environmental performance in the early stage of the building life cycle, and over service life, based on robust and consistent assessment practices across the buildings sector and across Member States and Associated Countries.

The next generation of energy performance assessment and certification schemes needs to support the transition towards a climate neutral building stock over the full life cycle, relying on technological innovations to improve speed and quality of as-built performance assessment and service life compliance checks, also linking to other instruments such as building logbooks, building renovation roadmaps, Level(s) and other datasets. Energy performance assessment and certification schemes should seek to work coherently, where relevant, with other performance data generated over the building’s life cycle. This can include well-being, indoor air quality, noise and acoustic quality, daylight levels, pollutants and health related data, as well as data pertaining to other issues such as accessibility of buildings, and consumption of non-energy resources such as water.

The proposal should:

• Develop more reliable, cost-effective and highly replicable energy performance calculation methods also addressing, in parallel, relevant life-cycle performance aspects (e.g. well-being, indoor air quality and comfort, acoustics, water consumption, resilience, or whole life carbon) with a direct link to the energy efficiency performance.
• Address the definition and demonstration of advanced and innovative approaches for building energy performance and certification, and how these can interact with other relevant life cycle performance data and certification, focusing on a credible assessment of building intrinsic performance but also increasingly working towards output-based assessments using available building data; Investigate how such approaches can rely on automatic and semi-automatic assessment based on building digital models (e.g. BIM).
• Seek to incorporate in those approaches social and economic indicators.
• Develop dynamic energy and other relevant life-cycle performance assessment and certification databases as a unique source of information on individual buildings over their lifetime for home owners, investors, real estate agents and public authorities.
• Demonstrate how data from smart sensors can be included in assessments in a dynamic way, also exploring, where relevant, how to combine building asset rating with building operational rating, and how to use digital innovations for the assessment of energy and other relevant life-cycle performance.
• Ensure the proposed solutions build on the results of previous projects dealing with building performance including Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), also considering where relevant integrating building renovation passports or roadmaps in EPCs.
• Ensure the proposed solutions allow for synergies with other relevant instruments (e.g. the smart readiness indicator under Directive 2010/31/EU, building renovation passports and relevant parts of Level(s)).
• Seek to ensure from the design phase that the project is developed with a view to integrate its results/deliverables under a digital building logbook.
• Ensure that the proposed solutions comply with, and support a broad adoption of, relevant EU standards (e.g. Energy Performance of Buildings standards developed by CEN, CENELEC and ETSI under Mandate M/480) and codes in order to allow for an EU-wide deployment.
• Ensure the involvement of relevant stakeholders (including European, national and regional certification bodies and consumer organisations).

Clustering and cooperation with other relevant projects is strongly encouraged; in particular, liaison and synergies with the Horizon Europe Partnership on ‘People-centric sustainable built environment’.

Proposals submitted under this topic should include a clear business case and exploitation strategy, as well as demonstration activities (at least three demonstration use cases) of an adequate scale.

This topic requires the effective contribution of SSH disciplines and the involvement of SSH experts, institutions as well as the inclusion of relevant SSH expertise, in order to produce meaningful and significant effects enhancing the societal impact of the related research activities.

Activities are expected to achieve TRL 6-7 by the end of the project – see General Annex B.

Societal Engagement
Socio-economic science and humanities