RE-SKIN aims to enhance total energy and environmental efficiency in the building sector, intensively applying at the same time the life cycle sustainability and circular economy principles. At a glance, the project is expected to develop and demonstrate an integrated, multi-technology and low-impact renovation package for energy retrofit and smart upgrade of residential, public and commercial buildings, with the following specific objectives:
1. to develop sustainable and circular-economy-based systemic solutions for building renovation;
2. to upgrade state-of-the-art technologies for their systemic integration;
3. to promote circular economy approach in building retrofit;
4. to improve res affordability;
5. contribute to standardisation and certification activities;
6. make the building resilient to climatic-environmental emergencies;
7. promoting the architectural quality of retrofit interventions.
The project is fully in line with the EU Renovation Wave strategy, which aims to improve the energy performance of buildings and, consequently, reduce the related consumption of energy and resources, with a view to circular economy.
RE-SKIN’s target focuses on a specific share of the European building stock: multi-storey, brick-and-masonry residential, public and tertiary buildings of the second half of the 20th century. The large number of these constructions, their poor energy performance and the considerable similarities across countries make it an optimal objective for a wide-ranging intervention strategy. The corresponding amount roughly sums up to 1,000,000 residential buildings and around 500,000 public and tertiary buildings, for a total net floor area estimated of about 1.4 billion m2.
On such a target, RE-SKIN is going to provide a primary energy consumption reduction of about 90% and a has the capacity to reduce CO2 emissions related to the retrofit by about 90% in operation (to which must be added, in a truly life-cycle perspective, a 60% reduction in the construction phase and 30% in the decommissioning phase), thus being in line with the ambitious EU targets. This result is clearly exceeding the usual renovation, where the savings are not exceeding 50% of pre-renewal status. The 4 pilot sites in RE-SKIN will become sources of data tests and validation for the above-mentioned results. Also in this case, moreover, the modelling of the cloud-based platform of RE-SKIN will also provide further support to the measured on-field results, thus further allowing for the generalization of the impacts of the project.
This extra 40% of savings, if applied to the overall stock of EU buildings undergoing a yearly renovation (around 1%), brings a massive theoretical impact: 14 TWh/y energy savings at EU level and around 2,800,000 tons/y in terms of avoided CO2 emissions, considering an EU average of 200 gCO2/kWh.
