Abstract
The European Union 2050 climate neutrality goal and the climate crisis require coordinated efforts to reduce energy consumption in all sectors, and mainly in buildings greatly affected by the increasing temperature, with relevant CO2 emissions due to inefficient end-use technologies. Moreover, the old building stock of most countries requires suited policies to support renovation programs aimed at improving energy performances and optimize energy uses. A toolbox was developed in the framework of the PrioritEE project to provide policy makers and technicians with a wide set of tools to support energy efficiency in Municipal Public Buildings. The toolbox, available for free, was tested in the partners’ communities, proving its effectiveness. The paper illustrates its application to the Potenza Municipality case study in which the online calculator DSTool (the core instrument of the toolbox) was utilized to select and prioritize the energy efficiency interventions in public buildings implementable in a three-year action plan in terms of costs, energy savings, CO2 emissions’ reduction and return on investments. The results highlight that improvements in the building envelopes (walls and roofs), heating and lighting and photovoltaic systems allow reducing CO2 emission approximately 644 t/year and saving about 2050 MWh/year with a total three-year investment of 1,728,823 EUR.
Highlights
The European Union (EU) as a signatory of the Paris Agreement [1], aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030 compared to 1990 [2]
This paper focuses on the application of the Decision Support Tool (DSTool) to the case study of the municipality of Potenza (Southern Italy), where selected municipal public buildings were characterised and analyzed to identify the priority interventions to improve energy efficiency and optimize energy uses, evaluating their effectiveness in term of energy savings, reduction in CO2 emissions and return on investment (ROI)
An increased resilience to the negative effects of climate change. This political commitment will be translated into concrete actions outlined in a Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP), which must be presented by the signatories, reporting every two years on the progress of their plans with respect to a Baseline Emission Inventory. This gives the Municipality of Potenza the opportunity to foster the adoption of quantitative tools to draw up an action plan for reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions, starting from the municipal public buildings, which are very inefficient, and whose consumption represents a considerable share of the energy bill
Summary
The European Union (EU) as a signatory of the Paris Agreement [1], aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030 compared to 1990 [2]. Among the measures aimed at improving the building stock, the new EPBD [11] requires that all new buildings must be nearly zero-energy buildings (NZEB) from 31 December 2020 (for all new public buildings, this obligation is brought forward to 31 December 2018) It sets the cost-optimal minimum energy performance requirements for existing buildings that undergo major renovation and for the replacement or retrofit of building elements like heating and cooling systems, roofs and walls, as it requires EU countries to draw up a list of the national financial measures that can support an improvement in the energy efficiency of buildings. The ultimate goal was to define a local action plan that could support the drafting of the city’s Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan (SECAP) that the city administration would like to implement starting from the previous Sustainable Energy and Action Plan (SEAP) [18]
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