Italy: The National Platform for the Energy Performance of Buildings (PnPE2)

Authors:

• Sara Momi, EU R&I Project Manager and Business Developer – Innovation Division, R2M Solution, Italy
• Marta Maria Sesana, Assistant Professor in Building Architectural Engineering, Department of Civil, Environmental, Architectural Engineering and Mathematics (DICATAM), University of Brescia, Italy
• Graziano Salvalai, Associate Professor – Architectural Engineering, Department of Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

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Thanks to the Legislative Decree of 4 August 2022, n. 304 “Operating procedures for a National Platform on the Energy Performance of Buildings”, the Italian Ministry for the Ecological Transition officially kicked-off the operation of the Portale nazionale sulla Prestazione Energetica degli Edifici (PnPE2) – National Platform for the Energy Performance of Buildings.

The platform, up and running, can be already accessed through the following link: https://pnpe2.enea.it/

It is managed by ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development) and it is covered by the funding available within the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, under “simplification and acceleration of procedures for the implementation of interventions for energy efficiency”.

The goal of the platform is to provide access to all the building performance information (in a targeted way and in line with the EU GDPR), useful for making the best decisions (investment opportunities) for their houses. Data will also be collected for statistical study helping mobilise private and public investment in energy efficiency in buildings.

A section of the platform is devoted to software and tools available online: https://pnpe2.enea.it/software. An example is the ABIM Viewer: by integrating the data of an energy diagnosis in any IFC file format, it allows the transfer of the results within the BIM model of the building. The software is also a free editor of IFC models which, through a user-friendly interface, allows the compilation and display of customized energy parameters (PSET), proposed by ENEA, to get the typical results of an energy diagnosis.

The platform stems by a former legislative decree (n. 48/2020, integration of the Directive 2018/844/UE). The article 8 of the same decree defines the platform role in providing information on: energy performance of buildings; best practices for cost-effective energy refurbishment; promotion of tools to improve the energy performance of buildings, including replacing fossil fuel boilers with more sustainable alternatives; mapping current Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs).

The purposes of PnPE2 include:

• having data about the current Italian real estate stock and increase knowledge about it, its energy consumption (a consistent archive being modular and populated by other mandatory registries)
• establishing a preliminary building passport composed by the already available datasets
• facilitating interventions of energy refurbishment, starting from public buildings: tax and non-tax benefits used by end-users/building owners over the time will be assessed, to support them in improving the energy performance of their building unit and optimize their investments.

Citizens and businesses as well as Public Administration (PA) bodies are the target audience of the PnPE2, even if with different roles and interests, by the provision of assistance and services like: energy mapping of buildings, compliance with the energy performance of building directive (EPBD), assessment of the efficiency potential and the selection of intervention priorities (including refurbishment plans), selection of the most appropriate promotion tools for the purpose (also via Energy Performance Contracts), training for increasing professional and technical skills.

To make the best of the platform, ENEA believes in a smooth cooperation among end-users and the PA bodies, ensuring correct and interoperable data collection from different databases (e.g., in Italy, data are on regional land cadastres), via several sources, such as:

• the national cadastre of energy performance certificates (APE)
• the one-stop shop of qualified energy assessors (currently split at regional level)
• Gestore dei Servizi Energetici (GSE)
• the Information System on the operations of public bodies
• the Patrimonio della PA project
• the Iper database of Agenzia del Demanio
• the cadastral archives managed by Agenzia delle Entrate and ENEA
• the database on school buildings, under the national inventory of regional data
• the registry of dwellers and the registry of house numbers and urban streets
• information from the tax authorities on tax deductions (super-bonus, eco-bonus, building renovation and more).

Figure 1 – Homepage of the Italian Platform – https://pnpe2.enea.it/

The strategy set for the PnPE2 foresees that data will be collected also on:

• buildings and real estate units (surface, volume, number of rooms, year of construction, cadastral category)
• energy characteristics of buildings and real estate units (EPC class, annual consumption by energy vector, withdrawal power, opaque and transparent dispersing surface, transmittance of opaque and transparent surfaces, types of heating systems, DHW, air conditioning, electricity production, EV charging columns, as well as related energy power and yields)
• maintenance interventions (building elements, year of the intervention, incentive received for the intervention)
• information on public and private services (Annex I to the decree) and on qualified energy assessors, as per Presidential Decree no. 75/2013
• assessments of savings potential (list of interventions, implementation costs, expected savings)
• other general information by ISTAT (municipal code, census section, resident population, mountain areas, climatic zones, areas of seismic risk, hydrogeological risk, water consumption).

As partners of EPC RECAST, we very much welcome the Italian initiative that intends to improve the PnPE2 platform for having a big, interoperable archive of EPCs and related data on buildings, both private and public ones. Digitization in the built environment, for both refurbishment and renovation interventions, to increase the energy efficiency performance and liveability of buildings, is the way we are proposing within the EPC RECAST project and all the projects belonging to the NextGen EPC cluster.

This Italian platform can be seen as a first confirmation that both the EPC RECAST Methodology and Toolkit under development within the EPC RECAST project are on the right track toward a useful and user-centric approach for increasing the transparency, and reliability of the EPC across Europe.