Energy performance certificates (EPCs) need better data and harmonisation between Member States in order to be a catalyst for the European Commission's planned 'renovation wave' initiative, says a report from X-tendo, a project bringing together a consortium of thirteen institutions working on the implementation of certificates, published on Tuesday 19 May.
According to the document, the cases of the United Kingdom, Denmark, Portugal and Belgium prove that certificates can help accelerate the renovation of buildings by increasing consumer and investor confidence in energy saving measures.
However, different implementation approaches in European countries have hampered this potential, with some end-users tending not to trust certificates in countries where the system is not well developed, such as Bulgaria and Poland, the report points out.
Thus, “to truly scale up building renovations, we need better data, better implementation processes, a harmonised understanding of EPCs and comparability between countries ”, says Jonathan Volt, project manager at Buildings Performance Institute Europe, one of the consortium member organisations.
Introduced in 2002 by the European Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings (2002/91), EPCs are a rating system that assign buildings a score between A (very efficient) and G (inefficient) based on their energy performance.
See the report: https://bit.ly/2X8ZiUF (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)