Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) represent a relevant instrument supposed to be strongly structuring for the assessment of buildings energy performance, decision support for energy retrofit projects, articulation of financing instruments, benchmark of building assets and market value recognition. However, their potential remains largely underexploited because of several challenges:
• Improving their reliability – results variance depending on the assessor, input data and calculation tools, lack of understanding between predicted and actual energy performance – represents a crucial issue to unlock confidence, decision support and financing.
• To engage end-users towards deep renovation, the certification is to structure clear, user-friendly information about the building asset and tangible pathways to ambitious targets with respect to building overall quality and energy performance improvement.
• The design for the overall process and certification outputs must be more owner and occupant centric and allow European benchmark and public policies analysis.
• All EU countries have established independent EP certification systems with independent mechanisms of control. At EU scale, many different EPC schemes co-exist. They are based on very different principles and assessment methodologies, rendering harmonization and comparability complex.
To tackle these challenges, EPC RECAST set a structured process and toolbox supporting the implementation and validation of a new generation of EP Assessment and Certification for residential buildings, for which retrofit is a challenging and pressing issue. By improving the usability, reliability and comparability of EPCs, and linking them to renovation roadmaps and digital logbooks, EPC RECAST contributes to unprecedented user awareness of building efficiency.
