Demonstration of EPC RECAST solutions across 6 different countries
Energy retrofit strategies for buildings represent a major challenge for the achievement of EU decarbonisation goals. EPC RECAST is developing a well-structured process and a toolbox that supports the development, performance and validation of new Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) with particular focus on existing residential buildings with high retrofit needs. Within this context, EPC RECAST partner Politecnico di Milano, under the guidance of Graziano Salvalai, are coordinating efforts to validate the EPC RECAST approach in different contexts and countries across Europe for a new generation of EPCs.
The demonstration activity focuses mainly on monitoring real energy needs to verify the reliability of the performance assessment with the EPC RECAST methodology for deriving the primary energy needs according to the different measured point and the energy vector. For this purpose, 113 demonstration sites across 6 different EU countries (France, Luxembourg, Germany, Slovakia, Italy and Spain) are being used as representation of a set of varying and complementary contexts in terms of construction types (building materials and technologies), actual energy performance, energy carriers (for heating and cooling), building typology, aggregation and climate context.
The selected pilots have been clustered in three main groups according to their building typology, energy generation and distribution type as well as the energy meters installed:
- single houses with independent heating/cooling/ventilation systems,
- apartment in multifamily buildings with independent heating/ cooling/ventilation system
- apartment in multifamily building with centralized heating/cooling/ventilation system.
Three main levels of monitoring have been identified and named as: (1) Basic, (2) Medium, and (3) Advanced Level.
The monitoring of the first 6 pilots is starting soon and will give us more information for further fine-tuning of the EPCRECAST methodology and the longer-term monitoring that will be performed for the majority of the pilot buildings.
This long-term data collection will allow us to assess the real consumption of each residential unit, showing the share of each activity such as heating, cooling, domestic hot water, ventilation and electricity together with indoor/outdoor temperatures and relative humidity.
