Data-driven decision-support to increase energy efficiency through renovation in European building stock.

Objective

While EU policy assigns a primary role to Energy Efficiency (EE), the lack of a holistic understanding of the impact of EE investments has hindered its integration in the policy-making process. Coordination between demand and supply side of energy policy is not targeted, and there is need to gather the evidence on the benefits of EE in ecological and socio-economic terms as well as on its interactions with the broader policy context and energy market. The EERAdata project aims to address this challenge by supporting policy decisions and related stakeholders with an organic set of instruments to prioritise investments in energy efficiency in the context of the European building stock and its potential for renovation.

The EERAdata project will develop and test a decision-support tool to help local administrations in the collection and processing of their building and demographic data towards an assessment and prioritization of EE measures in planning, renovating and constructing buildings. The tool will be operationalized through a software application capable of merging data from various sources, formats and fields, which will then model and assess the impact of energy efficiency investment in buildings across several categories of impact, and against a range of supply-side measures.

Partner municipalities will participate to the design of the tool and test its application in regional pilots. The pilots will be part of a wider process of stakeholder engagement aimed at ensuring the usefulness of the different instruments, their applicability across different geographical and economic contexts, and its adoption beyond the life-span of the project. To this end, the project team will establish regional networks of stakeholders centred around the partner municipalities. These networks will be engaged throughout the project to bridge the gap between demand- and supply-side of energy policy.