To strengthen policies that promote retrofitting and modernizing existing buildings, Article 4 of EU Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) requires EU member states to establish a long-term strategy for mobilizing investment in the renovation of the national building stock by 30 April 2014, and every 3 years thereafter. Art. 5 EED requests national governments to proceed in an exemplary way towards the renovation of the countries' public building stock. All EU member states have adhered to the requirement of Art. 4 EED, albeit most did not meet the 2014 deadline and some submitted their strategies as late as March 2015. Ten member states have submitted their second national building renovation strategy due by April 30, 2017.
It is well understood that the challenges of Art. 4 and Art. 5 EED may best be met if (i) national strategies consider and build on challenges and solutions found at regional and local level, and (ii) if national level strategies are translated and adapted to regional or local level expressions. The reason why is, among other things, that most of the public buildings are owned and occupied by regional and local level administrations. In many countries, however, the goals of the national strategies and the suggested measures have not really filtered down to regional and local level yet. The EmBuild approach was therefore to mirror national level strategies at the local level and to foster deep renovation in the building sector by municipal public building renovation strategies.
EmBuild prepared a methodology that allows energy managers at municipal level to analyze their building stock and to suggest preferences and priorities for renovation activities. Preliminary analysis looks at basic data of the public building stock with a view to identifying priority buildings with the highest potential for energy-savings. Detailed analysis for priority buildings is performed before the start of renovation measures. In addition to the technical measures required for the deep renovation of buildings, EmBuild suggested methods to identifying low- and no-cost measures, as for example improvements of energy user behaviour, for the improvement of energy performance of buildings.
Based on this approach, the EmBuild project triggered and supported the development of municipal building renovation plans covering public buildings in 129 municipalities in five countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Romania, Serbia, and Slovenia). These plans, when fully implemented, will lead to energy savings in the amount of 263 GWh/year.
EmBuild dissemination activities for the distribution of developed concepts, methods and tools as well as of the achieved projet results included publications (newsletters, social media posts etc.) and presentations to local, regional, national and European conferences and fairs reaching in total more than 45,500 experts and stakeholders all over Europe. Dissemination and discussion of Embuild concepts, methods and tools was further enhanced by an intensive social media campaign facilitating almost 85,000 contacts. All results of the EmBuild project are available for free download from the EmBuild website www.embuild.eu which counted approximately 140,000 contacts during project duration.
