As the European building stock accounts for 40% of the CO2 emissions, investments in energy efficiency upgrades are a key to reaching the ambitious climate goals set by the European Union. However, only 1% of buildings are renovated each year. One key to increasing this number is to attract private investments in energy efficiency refurbishments. This is what the Horizon2020 funded project EN-TRACK has set out to solve.
Stoyan Danov, the project coordinator explains: “The problem we address from EN-TRACK is the lack of data and empirical evidence on the performance of energy efficiency investments in real life. This has been detected as one of the major barriers for deciding on investments in buildings and for involving financial institutions and private investors in the process”. The EN-TRACK project aims to close the existing information gap by collecting massive data on the energy and financial performance of energy efficiency investments in buildings. The project will expose different services to building owners and financial institutions in order to provide them data-driven support for investment decisions. The aim is the project solution to become a pole of attraction for relevant stakeholders interested in obtaining value from their data, thus making the data collecting a continuous process.
Developing a market relevant solution
“EN-TRACK will develop a platform based on big data technologies that will enable gathering and alignment of data from different sources which allows for buildings performance-tracking and action-oriented benchmarking. Basically, the assessment of the energy efficiency investments’ performance needs both financial and energy data and the problem is these are currently dispersed among different systems or providers. We will join these data to extract the useful information”, Stoyan tells us.
However, this is not just a theoretical exercise. One key element of this project is to engage relevant stakeholders at all stages of the development. EN-TRACK is expected to engage more than 35 financial institutions and 100 building owners of all types, with the aim of creating an innovative and self-sustaining solution that will outlive the project lifetime. This co-creation approach means that the output of EN-TRACK will meet the real needs of the market and stakeholders.
Supporting EU Climate Policies
“Our technology is capable to collect information from millions of buildings, to statistically analyse it and provide services to thousands of users, without revealing information on individual buildings and keeping strict and transparent security procedures. EN-TRACK has the potential to become one of the key technological platforms supporting the ambitious EU Climate Policies by enabling the capability to track the real energy performance and emissions from the European building stock. Hence, a crucial success criterion for EN-TRACK will be the market uptake of the solution by the public authorities, large building owners and financial institutions”, Stoyan explains.