This expert workshop is one of a series covering the following topics: energy, buildings, location, assessment methods and data in relation to European Directives on Energy Efficiency (EED), Energy Performance of Buildings (EPBD), INSPIRE, establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe and the Covenant of Mayors (CoM) initiative.
These workshops are jointly organised by the EC DG JRC project on Energy and Location and the European Union Location Framework (EULF) action of the EC ISA Programme (Interoperability Solutions for Public Administration) .
So far the JRC team has produced a feasibility study and started a dedicated pilot project on location data for buildings related energy efficiency policies .
The first event organised was the workshop on “Spatial data for modelling building stock energy needs” held at JRC in Ispra 23-25 November 2015 .
The aim of this second workshop was to discuss different approaches and methodologies to
Eleven invited leading organisations and EU projects were invited to take part in this workshop sending experts to present their projects and discuss how to assess synergies and how to arrive to a coherent approach for assessment of energy use in the built environment. Another twelve people from JRC, experts on energy efficiency, energy performance, geospatial data modelling and processing participated to the workshop.
From the discussions, it has emerged that a holistic approach would give more evidence of the needs for measures to reduce energy consumption. This is a bit in contrast to what the EU policy requests by the present energy related Directives. More and more it becomes evident that the target should be reducing emissions and not necessarily reducing energy consumption. Integration of energy technologies are playing an important role at a higher level than the building only (i.e. at the EPBD–level). The energy market (gas and electricity) is able to provide an enormous buffer in storing energy virtually and the buildings itself should be much better balanced in energy terms to the thermal needs, e.g. heating and cooling. At the same time the energy network requires buildings for balancing.
INSPIRE could be very relevant for energy assessment in the built environment and for this reason the Energy Pilot initiated under the “Energy and Location” and “European Union Location Framework” projects will be continued over the next years.
Main objectives of the pilot project will be to continue to work on Use Cases already outlined, to be further elaborated based on the information gathered at the workshop. The JRC will seek to develop partnerships to implement the defined use cases with the selected partners.