One of the principal challenges to increasing energy efficiency investments in buildings is the lack of statistical data on the actual energy and costs savings achieved with them. However, this data is still hard to access, aggregate, share and utilise because it is being housed in many decentralised databases, and in different formats. The potential for providing more reliable empirical evidence on the performance of the potential investments based on analysis, comparisons and benchmarking of this data is huge but there is a puzzle to be solved for this potential to be realised.
The creation of “operational” databases supporting portfolio benchmarking has been addressed recently to certain extent by some tools and databases developed in Europe. However, due to lack of comparability and interoperability with other tools, it is difficult to achieve sufficient critical mass of data and users for successful commercial uptake of these tools. Achieving this comparability and interoperability is one of the puzzle pieces.
In parallel, large building portfolio owners such as Public Authorities and other large building owners, are responsible for a significant part of Europe’s building stock and already have the necessary energy and financial information to evaluate the performance of energy efficiency investments in their buildings. However, this information is dispersed and managed either in separate departments (O&M, Accounts, etc.) or by external providers, and data gathering is difficult. Facilitating the access to this information is another piece of the puzzle.
According to official sources, buildings in the EU are responsible for 40% of our energy consumption and roughly 75% of the EU building stock is energy inefficient. Renovation of buildings to improve energy efficiency is given a prominent role in the European Green Deal, as it can produce enormous social impact by reducing emissions, diminishing dependence on fossil fuels, and tackling poverty. However, a huge amount of investment needs to be mobilised in order to fulfil this prominent role. This is yet another puzzle piece.
The EN-TRACK project successfully contributed to overcoming the above challenges by solving each individual puzzle and also by working to ensure that all of the pieces fit together to bring closer the overall goal: making financing of energy retrofitting in buildings a mainstream activity in the financial sector.
The project achieved all of its main objectives:
• EN-TRACK developed a big data platform for gathering large-scale data on the actual performance of energy efficiency investments in buildings. The platform went public in July 2023 and engaged more than 130 public building portfolio managers from Spain and Bulgaria in continuous data collection, gathering data on the performance of more than 9,000 buildings and 21,000 energy efficiency measures.
• The platform offered services for performance monitoring and robust benchmarking of buildings and energy efficiency investments for decision support and de-risking of investments, addressing more than 300 financial institutions and directly involving 75 of them in the project activities.
• The EN-TRACK platform established interoperability with the currently most active databases and tools in Europe, enabling data exchange and joint services. EN-TRACK became one of the major contributors of data to the EEFIG-DEEP platform, with investments performance data for more than 4,200 buildings already submitted. It also developed and successfully demonstrated joint services with the eQuad platform, enabling data exchange, financial pre-qualification services, and access of energy efficiency projects to investors.
• The EN-TRACK platform obtained highly successful results towards its objective to become economically sustainable by ensuring funding from the Government of Catalonia until 2028 for adopting it as institutional platform for monitoring the energy and environmental performance of the public buildings in Catalonia. Moreover, the project concluded agreements with 10 other building owner organisations and 5 financial institutions for the use of its services (16 agreements in overall) which are a very good premise for its long-term economic sustainability.
