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Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BuildHEAT (Standardised approaches and products for the systemic retrofit of residential Buildings, focusing on HEATing and cooling consumptions attenuation.)

Teaser

Summary

Space heating uses are quite uniform all over Europe, amounting to around 140-170 kWh/m2y of final energy consumption, compared to around 25 kWh/m2y needed for DHW preparation. Space cooling consumption is an issue mainly in the southern countries, where it generally ranges between 30 and 50 kWh/m2y. In absolute terms, heating consumption in the residential sector in Europe arrives at around 2300 TWh/y, DHW consumption reaches 500 TWh/y, while cooling consumption is less than 100 TWh/y (the total heat consumption in Europe is around 6500 - 7000 TWh/y2). From this picture, it is clear that space heating consumption needs to be addressed most urgently. Nonetheless, solutions that cover both, space heating and cooling, avoiding future increases of cooling loads, are most attractive.
The construction sector offers unique opportunities to decarbonise the European economy. However, as the replacement rate of the existing stock is very small (1-1.5 % per year), acceleration is needed.
On top of this, the reorganisation of the construction sector poses tremendous challenges due to its extreme fragmentation: more than 50% of the residential buildings are owned by private single owners. Moreover, whilst few major industrial players are active on the market, it is largely dominated (more than 95%) by SMEs, both on the manufacturersâ€™ and the professionalsâ€™ side.
BuildHeat addresses this challenging sector by:
- elaborating systemic packages for the deep rehabilitation of residential buildings
- developing innovative technologies facilitating the implementation of the renovation measures
- developing financial tools enabling large public and private investments
- involving the construction chain from the very beginning and all along the building life cycle.
A set of reliable, energy efficient and affordable retrofit solutions will be made available, which execution is facilitated by industrialised, modular and flexible HVAC, faÃ§ade and ICT systems developed. BuildHeat integrated solutions allow to reduce the space heating and domestic hot water demand from the actual standards (170-190 kWh/m2y) to around 50 â€“ 70 kWh/m2y, with an investment cost in the range of 50-60% lower than the new built.
Despite the affordability, innovative solutions are more expensive compared to off the shelf ones. Therefore financing models are needed to facilitate the massive entry to market of the new technologies. BuildHeat aims to leverage large private investments by using European structural funds, thus promoting retrofit actions at quarter level.
The innovative retrofit solutions developed throughout BuildHeat are demonstrated in 3 multi-family houses, located in Rome (IT), Zaragoza (ES) and Salford (UK), accounting for more than 170 dwellings overall.

Work performed

Technologies
The partners are working from different perspectives to develop retrofit solutions to be used at the demo sites.
A PV driven air-to-air HP with integrated DHW production and storage capability is under elaboration. It is foreseen that the HP and the fans are directly coupled with a PV field with 4-6 panels (around 1kWp), by means of a micro inverter developed for the purpose.
In parallel, a flat thermal storage tank for utilisation in single dwellings with integrated hydronic distribution unit and mechanical ventilation unit is being prototyped.
Another team is working on a faÃ§ade system that integrates a substructure able to anchor different cladding systems, windows and solar thermal and PV panels, leaving enough space to also allocate facilities such as pipes, wires and ducts in order to ease the retrofitting process, by reducing intrusive interventions inside the dwellings. The faÃ§ade system is complemented by the development of a hybrid reflective coating to tune the radiative heat exchanges of the envelope package.
Demo sites
The effectiveness of all the retrofit solutions will be demonstrated in the three demo cases located in Italy, Spain and the UK. While in the first phase of the project the activities are focused on auditing energy performance and user behaviour at the demo buildings, monitoring will be performed after retrofit at each dwelling.
Retrofit financing
Regardless the effort devoted to develop technically better and cheaper solutions for the energy retrofit of residential buildings, the stagnating European economy poses extreme challenges to the widespread utilisation of those solutions, due to the initial investment costs constituting a prohibitive barrier to single private customers.
For this reason, the financial mechanisms that are more adequate to support the renovation process are being assessed, and innovative mechanisms are designed to explore investment synergies among single customers, private investment funds and relevant EU and national public investment funds.
Exploitation and dissemination of the technologies
Activities are focused on the life of the technologies beyond project end: exploitation of the technologies developed during the project, is based on possible synergies among partners for future cooperation, while it is necessary to promote their adoption on the market.
On top of all the project achievements, the partners are promoting them among the identified target groups, helping to raise awareness.

Final results

As a whole, the innovation described moves far forward from state of the art in the residential buildingsâ€™ renovation market and the H&C market in general.
The innovative technologies developed with respect to both, HVAC and envelope solutions, move towards the massive use of RES and waste heat from air. This is done thanks to the exploitation of the diffused thermal capacity management approach (through compact thermal storages), and the distributed monitoring and control infrastructure.
The innovation here is linked to the high degree of prefabrication and to the standardisation of the devices and sizes adopted. Moreover, the technological developments follow the market trend of assessing low intrusive, scalable and easy to install devices.
This way, BuildHeat has the potential to streamline the deep renovation actions by simplifying the planning process, the installation and maintenance of the solutions implemented, and to trigger the transformation of the installers sector from low-level jobs to highly skilled professions.
Apart for the technical developments, most of the innovation potential of the project also resides in the social dimension of its solutions. The renovation action is not seen any more as a closed pack that the single customer has to trust and adopt. The deep rehabilitation is structured as a process involving all the stakeholders of the construction chain from the very beginning -when the decisions have to be taken and funding sought-, through the planning and installation phases and all along the life time of the building -in a continuous commissioning process-.
The above innovation has a disruptive potential: there are around 2 million residential buildings in Europe with a total of 17 bm 2 of living area. If we consider the worst scenario of a renovation ratio that remains anchored to the 1%/y, and we believe that we can intercept only 0.1% of such market by reducing its PE energy consumptions from around 250 to around 50 kWh/m2y, savings in PE consumption of around 34 GWh a year can be computed. These would correspond to around 7500 tons of CO2 saved every year.