With the target established by the European Commission (EC) of a full decarbonisation by 2050, the EU recognises the need to steer to a high-quality building stock. However, it is often the case that buildings do not perform as originally planned, because of their design and/or their use. The H2020 EU-funded project ExcEED launches a new platform orchestrating seamless integration of heterogeneous data related to building energy performances. The platform aims at accelerating energy awareness, analysis of energy performance and benchmarking across buildings in different EU regions.
The lack of reliable or comparable data in many Member States hampers effective policy making and represents a key barrier in understanding the status of the European building stock. Learning from what has been recently built is therefore a must, as well as improving environmental quality and performances of our buildings. This is where the ExcEED project comes in, to support the owner of buildings data in learning more about the energy efficiency of his buildings and benchmarking to highlight and achieve energy and costs savings. Moreover, ExcEED can support policy makers by taking the pulse of the actual energy consumed by the building stock, improving the future design and establishing this way a robust return of knowledge mechanism.
The platform provides insights on the energy performances of single buildings and districts in operational conditions, both related to energy consumption and indoor environmental quality. The platform is made of a range of tools allowing automatic calculation of dedicated Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), as well as algorithms for geo-clustering and benchmarking. The ExcEED web-based Indoor Environmental Quality survey allows to collect information from the buildings’ occupants regarding air quality, thermal comfort, visual comfort and acoustic performance. The geo-cluster tool helps to select, cluster and display buildings performance by geographic area, highlighting common spatial patterns and regions per group of energy indicators.
The ExcEED platform is now ready to be exploited and filled in with buildings data coming from building monitoring systems, projects, other European databases or tools. To comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the data uploaded by the user to the dashboard will be kept anonymous and confidential.
Assessing the gap between designed and as-built performance of a building allows for better planning and tighter regulation, that help creating an energy efficient, healthy and comfortable built environment, central in the EU 2050 vision. Building managers, designers, building owners, industry and policy makers should all benefit from the return of knowledge mechanism developed by ExcEED.
The platform is freely available until September 2019 to those uploading buildings data.
Partners of ExcEED: EURAC (Coordinator), BPIE, WATTICS, 3E, HOVAL.
ExcEED stands for European Energy Efficient building district Database: from data to information to knowledge.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 723858.
Source : Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE)