The LIFE EP-0 tool combines open data and spatial analysis to help municipalities visualise, assess and monitor energy poverty, from the building level to urban districts to the building level.
Lorenza Pistore - EU Research Project Manager (R2M Solution) | LinkedIn profile
(Note: Opinions in the articles are of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Union)
Energy poverty continues to affect millions of households across Europe. According to Eurostat, an estimated 41 million people in Europe - around 9.3% of the population - were unable to adequately heat their homes in 2022, highlighting the severity of this issue. Rising energy costs, social inequalities and climate-related risks further exacerbate the challenge, creating significant barriers to accessibility for vulnerable groups. While EU-level policies and initiatives, such as the Energy Efficiency Directive, the Renovation Wave and the Social Climate Fund, provide frameworks to address energy poverty and promote a just energy transition, translating these policies into actionable local strategies remains difficult. Municipalities often face barriers due to the complexity of gathering detailed household-level data and the high costs of extensive surveys.
In the LIFE Energy Poverty 0 (EP-0) project, a practical tool was developed that integrates building-level energy and environmental performance analyses with a district-scale assessment and mapping of energy and social vulnerability. This model creates a complementary multi-scale assessment of urban challenges that commonly affect cities. By leveraging existing databases and publicly available statistical data, this tool allows local authorities to identify at-risk areas without relying on time-consuming and resource-intensive building or household surveys. To evaluate vulnerability to energy poverty, it integrates socio-economic, building and energy indicators into a multi-dimensional Vulnerability Index, offering a clear and actionable overview of vulnerability across urban areas.
The approach is designed with the concepts of adaptability, scalability and replicability in mind, making it suitable for integration into municipal energy planning, social and climate resilience strategies and broader sustainable development initiatives. A case study application in the Municipality of Milan illustrates how this methodology can guide local decision-making and resource allocation, prioritise interventions – including at the building level – and support equitable energy transition policies.
Overall, the Energy Poverty 0 project delivered a practical tool for practitioners in public authorities striving for data-driven strategies to address energy poverty, while factoring in energy efficiency in buildings, environmental sustainability, social equity, financial planning, and long-term urban resilience.
Across European municipalities, the persistent challenge in addressing energy poverty lies not only in political will but also in operational obstacles. While high-level policies, frameworks and funding mechanisms exist, local authorities often lack the granular, integrated data needed to translate these into targeted, socially just interventions. Traditional case-by-case building surveys and single-household approaches, though valuable, are time-consuming, costly and often unscalable beyond limited pilot areas.
The EP-0 project directly addressed this gap through the development of an open-source digital platform designed to map, assess and prioritise energy retrofit actions in the most vulnerable urban districts. The EP-0 tool is an ICT solution that enables practitioners to combine building, energy and socio-economic data into a coherent analytical framework, guiding both technical and policy decisions. Unlike many single-purpose energy audit tools, EP-0 integrates a holistic urban perspective, combining multi-dimensional vulnerability assessment, building-level energy performance and environmental data, financial pre-feasibility analysis and catalogued retrofit solutions into one web-based environment. Its design philosophy, driven by adaptability, scalability and replicability, makes it particularly relevant to municipalities, public housing organisations and institutions tackling energy poverty, usually facing budget, capacity and data-availability constraints.
The EP-0 tool is publicly accessible as a web platform, and its source code, together with the main reference documentation, is archived on Zenodo under the Apache 2.0 licence.
The EP-0 tool operates through an integrated architecture that connects multiple analytical layers, each addressing a distinct but interconnected decision-making domain (Figure 1):
Catalogues. This repository of retrofit solutions provides information on available industrialised prefabricated technologies for rapid and cost-effective renovation.
Lastly, the Guidelines and Readme sections provide technical instructions for data preparation, upload and visualisation to ensure transparency and replicability in other areas. Together, these modules enable users to move from diagnosis to scenario development and investment planning.
Figure 1. EP-0 tool functional layers. Source: Author’s own elaboration.
The Vulnerability Index layer represents the EP-0 tool’s most innovative feature. Built on methodologies aligned with the Energy Poverty Advisory Hub (EPAH) and supported by scientific literature, this approach analyses key indicators related to energy and social vulnerability. It focuses on three main dimensions: i) socio-economic factors, including average household income, unemployment rates, education level, housing tenure and age demographics; ii) building conditions, such as the age and conservation status of the housing stock; and iii) energy costs, measured as the ratio of energy expenditure to average household income. These indicators are then integrated into a comprehensive Global Vulnerability Index (GVI) for the city’s census sections.
The process follows six standardised steps:
This methodology overcomes the dependence on intrusive household surveys and ensures periodic updates as new statistical data become available (in line with the principles of data privacy). It also supports the integration of additional indicators over time.
The platform’s Building Data layer delivers a building energy audit built on the iNSPiRe project database of pre-simulated archetypes, which covers a wide range of European residential building typologies and climates. Instead of requiring new energy simulations, the EP-0 tool assigns each building to an archetype based on its year of construction and shape factor (surface area to volume ratio). This classification allows the tool to estimate, for selected types of buildings, baseline heating and cooling energy consumption, CO₂ emissions and post-retrofit performance across several efficiency levels. By adopting this pre-simulated approach, the EP-0 platform drastically reduces analytical time while ensuring consistency with the European building stock. Municipalities can instantly visualise baseline conditions for numerous buildings and evaluate retrofit scenarios. Buildings can also be grouped into clusters using selection tools. Cluster-level summaries (average consumption, typology mix, potential savings) enable users to identify economies of scale and support collective renovation programmes.
While identifying energy and social vulnerability is crucial, the real implementation of effective actions depends largely on the financial feasibility of interventions. In this context, the EP-0 platform integrates a Financial Tool that performs quick pre-feasibility analyses for renovation projects at the building scale. Users can visualise pre-simulated economic inputs derived from the iNSPiRe database or adjust variables such as renovation investment cost, energy savings, loan interest rate and duration, incentive share and grant percentage. The tool then computes indicators such as total financing and amortisation schedule, Internal Rate of Return (IRR), payback period, Net Present Value (NPV), and net renovation cost after incentives. In addition, embedded country-specific links (based on the three countries that hosted the EP-0 project pilots: France, Italy the Netherlands) guide users to updated web pages of national subsidies and fiscal incentives. This empowers municipalities and housing operators to compare financial scenarios, prioritise investments and integrate accessibility considerations into budget planning.
Complementing the analytical layers is the Catalogue repository, which serves as a knowledge hub for industrialised retrofit technologies. The repository groups solutions into three macro-categories: thermal envelope systems (prefabricated façade panels, roof/floor insulation, modular façades); energy systems (HVAC, renewable energy modules, heat pumps, solar thermal systems); comfort and accessibility solutions (external lifts, balconies, monitoring or control devices). Each solution includes technical, environmental and economic parameters, such as installation requirements, cost ranges, lifespan, embodied CO₂, and an overview of potential co-benefits (e.g. improved thermal comfort, acoustics, indoor air quality, accessibility). Many solutions are derived from the EnergieSprong network, ensuring real-world applicability and industrial readiness. The catalogue thus bridges the gap between planning and implementation, providing a market-ready reference for decision-makers.
To ensure wide usability, the EP-0 platform includes practical guidelines for data collection and upload. The guideline package offers templates for the minimum building data necessary to run the Building Data layer. Standardised georeferencing processes support data visualisation on maps, and users can import datasets in GeoJSON or shapefile formats or link Excel tables to OpenStreetMap building IDs.
For users operating with simulation models, directly exported GeoJSON files are supported, simplifying interoperability between design environments and the EP-0 platform. A methodological document on vulnerability is also available to replicate the integrated analysis and mapping.
The EP-0 tool's main advantage lies in its open-source structure, integrating several technologies such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), custom Python scripts and user-friendly web interfaces. By bringing these components together, the EP-0 tool facilitates the evaluation of building performance, allows for the clear visualisation of various retrofit strategies and aids in determining both energy and social vulnerability across an entire district. Furthermore, the architecture of the tool is designed to ensure clarity and reproducibility, which supports future additions or integrations and potential interoperability with external GIS systems.
The Municipality of Milan served as a testing ground for the tool’s methodology. Several neighbourhoods across the city, selected during the project activities, were mapped within the Building Data layer of the EP-0 tool using a limited set of key inputs. This allows users to access baseline assessments of energy and environmental performance (Figure 2) for individual buildings, explore potential retrofit scenarios and solutions, make aggregated analyses for multiple buildings (Figure 3), and conduct building-level preliminary economic evaluations for various intervention types.
Figure 2. Building Data layer providing building-level information in Milan’s Corvetto neighbourhood.
Figure 3. Building Draw Selection functionality enabling aggregated analyses of buildings in Milan’s Corvetto neighbourhood.
The project also carried out an integrated energy and social vulnerability assessment by analysing and mapping key indicators (Figure 4) across key dimensions of vulnerability (such as socio-economic factors, building characteristics and energy costs). These analyses were integrated into a comprehensive Global Vulnerability Index for Milan’s districts (Figure 5). The resulting maps highlighted distinct spatial patterns: central districts showed mild vulnerability, mainly linked to ageing buildings but had higher incomes, whereas peripheral zones showed amplified socio-economic and energy vulnerabilities.
In this way, by combining results from the different data layers, users can effectively correlate socio-economic conditions with building typologies and energy performance metrics, enabling more informed multi-scale assessments towards urban and energy planning decisions. Municipal officers can use these insights to prioritise districts for renovation funding allocation, and inform the evolution of the city’s energy poverty plan, leveraging rapid diagnostics without household surveys, spatial visualisation which supports fair allocation of municipal resources, and interoperability with other planning instruments.
Figure 4. A set of indicators for social and energy vulnerability, mapped at census sections for the Municipality of Milan.
Figure 5. Global Vulnerability Index analysis and map for the Municipality of Milan.
The EP-0 tool is designed to assist municipal staff, urban planners and policymakers in addressing energy vulnerability in urban areas. It enables a series of analyses such as energy mapping at scale, the creation of baseline inventories of building energy demand and emissions, preliminary investment assessments and identification of suitable solutions.
By integrating technical information and social indicators with financial assessments, data is combined to assist decision makers in prioritising building renovation where it can have the greatest impact. The EP-0 tool can also support policy integration and the development and monitoring of Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAPs), helping local renovation programmes align with EU frameworks such as the Energy Efficiency Directive and the Social Climate Fund, and enabling clear, evidence-based engagement with citizens, NGOs and financial institutions. Beyond municipal use, research institutes, national energy poverty observatories and social housing providers can greatly benefit from the EP-0 tool and apply the methodology for analysis, monitoring and large-scale retrofit planning.
Data acquisition on the built environment and on social capital remains a key challenge: while public and open-source databases provide useful information, infrequent updates and limited harmonisation create major obstacles. To address this, the EP-0 tool can contribute to mitigating this gap thanks to an efficient, scalable, adaptable multi-level methodology. This methodology can successfully integrate with existing digital systems, evolve and guide evidence-based, coordinated strategies to address energy poverty locally and across Europe.
