Dear Readers,

In the European Green Deal, energy-efficient building renovation is highlighted as a key initiative to achieve a climate-neutral building stock by 2050, which in turn is a major building block for a climate-neutral society overall. To achieve this goal, the EU Commission published a strategy called "A Renovation Wave for Europe – Greening our buildings, creating jobs, improving lives". It shows that around 35 million buildings could be renovated by 2030, creating up to 160,000 additional green jobs in the construction sector. Buildings account for around 40 per cent of energy consumption in the EU and 36 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. It is obvious that effective measures must be taken in the building sector as quickly as possible to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050.

The Horizon 2020 project "QualDeEPC – High-quality energy performance assessment and certification in Europe accelerating deep energy renovation" is contributing to this challenge by working on quality-enhanced energy performance certificates (EPCs), their EU-wide convergence, and particularly making the recommendations that are provided on the EPCs consistent with very energy-efficient renovation. The aim is a comprehensive energy renovation strategy that focusses on savings of at least 60 per cent with regard to the building's energy use.
Under the coordination of Dr. Stefan Thomas, Maike Venjakob and Sriraj Gokarakonda from the Wuppertal Institute, the project partners from Germany, Greece, Bulgaria, Latvia, Hungary, Spain, and Sweden strive to create consensus on policy proposals in the participating countries and beyond, and will set impulses for the implementation of as many new or improved tools as possible during the project period.

Recently, the project team published its draft policy proposals and descriptions of tools. In addition to the improved energy efficiency recommendations, this includes a concrete proposal for an enhanced design and content of the EPC forms to make them more informative for building renovation activities and an online tool offering a first calculation of deep energy renovation potential for a building, as part of a one-stop shop approach. Details can be found in the "Green paper on good practice in EPC assessment, certification, and use" (available as D3.1).

These proposals were discussed by European building sector experts in the workshop "Next Generation Energy performance Certificates and Deep Renovation" in January 2021. At the same time, a series of national workshops in the project partner countries started, as well as the test phase of the improved, user-friendly EPC form and of the recommendations for deep energy renovation on the basis of almost 100 example buildings. Based on the workshop results and example buildings, the researchers from the Wuppertal Institute and its partners will develop the policy proposals and concepts for tools further. Adapted to the national situation in the project's seven implementation countries, the project will stimulate policy debate and implementation.