The current building stock is formed by about 160 million buildings in EU-25 that represent about 40% of the energy consumption and about 36% of the EU’s total CO2 emissions. The construction of new buildings represents between 1-1,5% of the building stock while the removed buildings represent about 0,2-0,5%. Assuming that this trend will continue in the period ahead, the focus needs to be put on renovation of existing buildings in order to achieve substantial impact in terms of energy saving and GHG reduction.
Taking into account that the number of refurbishments accounts roughly 2% of the housing stock per year, we can estimate that around one million dwellings are refurbished every year.
The purpose of the R2CITIES project is to develop and demonstrate replicable strategies for designing, constructing and managing large scale district renovation projects for achieving nearly zero energy cities. These results will open the way for new refurbishments on a European scale within the framework of new urban energy planning strategies
R2CITIES aims to develop and demonstrate an open and easily replicable strategy for designing, constructing, and managing large scale district renovation projects for achieving nearly zero energy cities. For this purpose, it will be developed a demonstration and dissemination framework of very innovative strategies and solutions for building energy renovation at district level, based in the following pillars:
- Three demonstrations of residential district retrofitting, in different countries, climate conditions and user’s habits
- A very ambitious dissemination programme focused on public and professional audiences.
- Several studies of cost-effective solutions for the holistic improvement of the energy performance of buildings at district level (definition of standard indicators and new diagnosis approach, analysis of existing energy technologies in a systemic approach, new strategies for urban energy planning, …)
- Deployment of a rigorous measurement and verification of energy performance and savings plan for each demonstration, taking into account standard protocols as IPMVP.
- A market and replication deployment plan, in order to ensure the project impact at business level, and a results exploitation strategy suitable for achieve a wide impact.
3 demo sites will be addressed for demonstrating the framework and associated impacts by developing real cases going beyond current market standards but ensuring the replicability of the concepts deployed. R2CITIES makes a difference from current state of the art, as it will be far away from current expensive and stand alone pilots that have failed into reaching the market. The very ambitious renovation plan of three residential districts, will involve more than 57.000 m2, more than 850 dwellings and more than 1500 users, with a potential of energy consumption reduction close to 60%.