REHOUSE. Working towards accelerating the EU building renovation rate

by Javier Antolín | May 10, 2024 | CARTIF Blog, Energy

In a world where sustainability is increasingly at the forefront of our concerns, the need for innovative solutions to transform our built environment is more pressing than ever. The current state of the EU building stock presents a significant challenge, acting as one of the largest energy consumers in Europe and responsible for over one third of the EU’s emissions.

Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the European Commission unveiled a new strategy in October 2020: “A Renovation Wave for Europe – Greening our buildings, creating jobs, improving lives.” This strategy represents a crucial step forward, aiming to incentivize investments in renovation and support the implementation of efficient methods and technologies.

Despite these efforts, the reality remains stark – over 75% of the EU building stock is not energy-efficient, and the annual renovation rate languishes at a mere 1%. The strategy emphasizes the need for deep renovations, those achieving over 60% reduction in energy consumption, as a top priority. The overarching goal? To double annual energy renovation rates over the next decade, not only to reduce emissions but also to enhance the quality of life for building occupants and create green jobs in the construction sector.

To achieve the depth and volume of renovation required, a strong and competitive construction sector is essential. Embracing innovation and sustainability is paramount to increasing quality and reducing production and installation costs. The Built4People European Partnership highlights three pillars crucial to this endeavour:

1. Industrialized Technological Solutions: Embracing advanced technologies to streamline construction processes.

2. Digitalization of the Construction Industry: Leveraging digital tools such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) to improve transparency and efficiency.

3. Integration of Circularity Principles: Incorporating circular economy principles across the entire value chain, from materials sourcing to waste management.

In the midst of this pressing need for renovation innovation, REHOUSE emerges as a beacon of hope. Coordinated by CARTIF and under the Horizon Europe program, REHOUSE is poised to lead the charge in innovation within the construction sector. With a laser focus on deep renovations and circularity principles, REHOUSE aims to develop and demonstrate eight renovation packages incorporating promising technology innovations up to TRL7 (Integrated pilot system demonstrated).

These renovation packages are meticulously designed to overcome the main barriers that impede current EU renovation ratios. Through the integration of active/passive elements, prefabrication, and off-site construction, REHOUSE seeks to deliver affordable and sustainable renovation solutions with the flexibility to address nearly 100% of building renovation challenges at the EU level.

But what truly sets REHOUSE apart is its people-centric approach. By actively engaging residents and building owners throughout the renovation process, the project ensures that solutions are not only sustainable but also affordable, satisfactory, and attractive.

REHOUSE is now at its halfway point, demonstrating remarkable progress and achievements. The project has already established the basis for the social innovation strategy, detailed the specifications of innovative solutions, and produced digital versions of the Renovation Packages. Additionally, an innovative evaluation framework and technical building diagnosis of the demo-sites have been completed. The validation of the Renovation Packages (RPs) is underway to achieve TRL6 (Prototype system verified), accompanied by the development of guidelines for their industrialization. Furthermore, the project is actively defining specifications for the Digital Building Logbook, designing and preparing the groundwork for the later construction of the demo-sites, and outlining the pathway towards market achievement after the project concludes. These efforts mark the beginning of our journey to revolutionize renovation processes, driven by innovation and collaboration.

Join us on this transformative journey as we pave the way for a brighter, greener tomorrow with REHOUSE. Together, we can reshape our built environment, create sustainable spaces, and preserve our planet for generations to come.

This project has received funding from the European Union´s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101079951.

Energy efficiency and shopping centres

by Javier Antolín | Mar 29, 2016 | CARTIF Blog, Energy

Shopping centres have been invented in the 1920’s in the United States and represent the modern version of a historical market place with their collection of independent retail stores, services, and parking area.

Over the whole of Europe there are thousands of retail outlets standing for almost 30% of the non-residential building stock, varying among other criteria in their functions, forms and sizes. Currently, more than 6 million companies are acting in the retail sector while around 30 million Europeans works in commerce.

New types of shopping centres emerge which meet public and retail needs, but the new types do not replace existing shopping formats, they instead add to the range of shopping facilities which already exist.

According to the International Council for Shopping centres (ICSC), a shopping centre is a scheme that is planned, built and managed as a single entity, comprising units and communal areas, with a minimum gross leasable area (GLA) of 5,000 square meters.

Shopping centres are sometimes perceived as icons of a consumerist society, because of their high energy demand, high CO2 emissions and waste. Therefore sustainability of the retail sector may significantly contribute to reach the long-term environmental and energy goals of the EU. Shopping centres are of particular interest due to their structural complexity, due to the high potential of energy savings and carbon emissions reduction, as well as due to their importance and influence in shopping tendencies and lifestyle.

While in the residential buildings, energy is mainly consumed by heating, domestic hot water and appliances, in the shopping centres, energy is used in a variety of ways, store lighting, ventilation, heating and air-conditioning, food refrigeration and others. However, the composition of the energy consumption varies from one retailer to another. Non-food retailers, have a different share of energy use compared to food retailers. For example, the electricity consumption of appliances in electronics stores is higher than in other kind of shops, which are more dependent on lighting, such as furniture or clothes shops.

The majority of European shopping centres are already built, but there is a still huge potential for energy savings, offering the possibility in many aspects to improve the technical systems, such as lighting and ventilation, or the building envelope, and monitoring systems. There are, however a number of major barriers to achieve the desired energy reductions and not all of these may be solved by the installation of new technical solutions. Pleasing customers is of primary importance in shopping centres, because customers provide the necessary profits, however customers are not demanding directly energy uses reductions in shopping centres, but demand among other things variety of products and low prices, access by public transport, parking and good location. Nevertheless, customer environmental awareness is increasing, which it is a very important factor to have the approval of the actions associated with energy efficiency by the customers and thus be a more positive factor when choosing where to shop.

There is currently a wide variety of conventional and innovative technologies and energy management systems, with which to renovate the shopping centres from an energy point of view. Thanks to this type of actions, a reduction in the energy consumption of the shopping centres and their corresponding greenhouse gas emissions will be achieved. The Energy Division of CARTIF, it is currently working on projects aimed at improving energy consumption in buildings, among which are shopping centres (CommONEnergy project), public buildings (BRICKER project) and residential and tertiary sector buildings (INSPIRE project). Through energy modelling and simulation tools, energy audits, instrumentation and control advance strategies, analysis and detailed studies on the incorporation of renewable energies, and our experience of over 15 years, we are able to reduce the economic and environmental cost of energy generation.

In summary, energy sustainability in commercial buildings is not only necessary for the environment, but provides added value to the products offered to potential customers.