The overview article 'From policy to practice: how renovation passports empower Europe’s Renovation Wave' explains the EU-level framework under Article 12 and Annex VIII of the recast EPBD. Following the January Topic of the Month about renovation passports (RP) and their role as catalysts for deep building renovation, this companion news item looks at how that framework is already being put into practice, through:

• national and regional initiatives that have developed passport-type tools, and
• a dense ecosystem of LIFE and Horizon projects building the methods, data infrastructure and digital tools that future renovation passport schemes will rely on.

It is meant to be a living resource: as new deliverables and national decisions emerge, it shall be updated with fresh examples and links.

EU coordination and guidance

The Concerted Action EPBD (CA EPBD) plays a central role in helping Member States interpret and implement the directive. Within CA EPBD, a dedicated topic on 'Deep renovation and renovation passports' collects:

• national definitions of renovation passports and deep renovation,
• information on pilots and early schemes, and
• links with National Building Renovation Plans (NBRPs), MEPS and financing frameworks.

The CA EPBD public database on existing buildings already highlights RP as a promising tool to increase deep-renovation rates and documents early activities in countries such as Germany, Belgium and France.

In parallel, the LIFE project EPBD.wise works directly with authorities in Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Ukraine to support effective EPBD implementation. One of its strands looks at RP in practice, covering aspects such as what governance models are realistic, how to connect passports to EPC databases and independent control systems, how to keep scheme costs low, and how to build on existing advisory structures. EPBD.wise prepares concrete recommendations for designing national RP schemes that are coherent with MEPS, NBRPs and funding measures.

National and regional examples

Germany, the individueller Sanierungsfahrplan (iSFP)

Germany’s individueller Sanierungsfahrplan (iSFP) has been in place since 2017 as a subsidised product of on-site energy advice. After an inspection, the homeowner receives a visually clear document that:

• describes the current performance of the dwelling,
• proposes a step-by-step renovation path towards a high-efficiency target, and
• estimates energy savings, investments and available grants.

If owners implement measures in line with the iSFP, they can access higher grant rates under federal funding schemes. Functionally, the iSFP already behaves like a Renovation Passport: it is building-specific, staged, aligned with financial support and anchored in a quality-controlled advisory system.

Flanders (Belgium), Woningpas, a digital building passport

In the Flemish Region of Belgium, every dwelling is accompanied by a free digital building passport called Woningpas. Accessible via the Flemish e-government portal, Woningpas brings together:

• EPC information and renovation advice,
• environmental and soil data,
• housing quality and planning constraints, and
• a space for owners to record works and documents.

Woningpas is not yet a full Renovation Passport in the EPBD sense, but it is a mature Digital Building Logbook that can host EPCs, inspection reports and, in the future, renovation roadmaps. It is one of the large-scale pilots in the Horizon Europe project Demo-BLog, which is demonstrating how Digital Building Logbooks can underpin Renovation Passports and wider building-policy objectives.

Ireland, Building Renovation Passport pilots and SEAI RD&D

In Ireland, the Irish Green Building Council (IGBC) carried out one of the earliest European pilots of Building Renovation Passports for single-family homes, supported by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI). The work included:

• a feasibility study and prototype BRP structure for Irish homes,
• pilots on a set of existing dwellings, and
• recommendations for integrating passports with BER (the Irish EPC), advisory services and national renovation planning.

Building on this, a new SEAI RD&D project 'Building Renovation Passport for Ireland' (Grant Ref: 23/RDD/1027) is developing a methodology and tools for passports tailored to the Irish context, including commercial buildings. Ireland is also one of the pilot countries of the LIFE OneClickRENO project (see below), which will test how automated BRPs can be embedded in national schemes.

France, Rénostandard and RESTORE under PROFEEL

In France, the national programme PROFEEL has supported a series of projects that lay the groundwork for passport-type approaches.

Rénostandard developed and tested standardised high-performance renovation packages for 11 typical single-family house archetypes. For each archetype, real-life pilot renovations were carried out and documented, covering energy performance, costs, logistics and user feedback.

RESTORE is a follow-up project coordinated by CSTB that aimed to massify and industrialise global renovation of single-family homes. It tested reproducible, partly prefabricated solutions in real conditions, produced detailed “fiche chantier” for each pilot site and analysed contractual and organisational models that make deep renovation more affordable and manageable.

Although these projects do not yet use the EPBD terminology, they show how typology-based deep-renovation strategies, combined with structured documentation, can feed directly into future Renovation Passport schemes in France.

Projects focusing directly on renovation passports

ALDREN, a BRP for non-residential buildings

The H2020 ALDREN project (Alliance for Deep Renovation in Buildings) created one of the first Building Renovation Passports for non-residential buildings, with a focus on offices and hotels. The ALDREN BRP combines:

• an ALDREN LogBook, a digital repository of technical, energy, IEQ and financial data for the building, and
• a RenoMap, a staged renovation roadmap towards high performance, with one or several deep-renovation steps.

The passport explicitly links energy, indoor environmental quality and asset value, and was designed to complement EPCs. Many of its features, staged renovation, IEQ and non-energy benefits, anticipated what EPBD Annex VIII now requires.

iBRoad and iBRoad2EPC, modular passport models tested in six countries

The H2020 project iBRoad introduced the concept of Building Renovation Passports for single-family homes. Its successor, iBRoad2EPC, developed a modular Renovation Passport model that can be integrated into EPC schemes, and tested it in Bulgaria, Greece, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Spain.

The model includes:

• a structured building description,
• a tailored renovation roadmap with one or more steps,
• an indication of impacts (energy, emissions, cost, comfort) for each step, and
• a simple logbook function to track work.

Results showed that energy experts can deliver a combined EPC and RP service without excessive extra burden, and that owners appreciate receiving a clear long-term plan instead of generic recommendations. 

OneClickRENO, automated, scalable and user-centred BRPs

The LIFE project OneClickRENO focuses squarely on making Building Renovation Passports automatic, scalable and user-friendly. It speaks directly to one of the main challenges in Article 12 EPBD, i.e. how to make passports widely available and affordable for millions of buildings.

• Develops a GIS-based web platform that can generate BRPs by combining existing building and context data (e.g. EPCs, cadastral information) with minimal user input.
• Designs automation workflows so that many passports can be produced at a low marginal cost.
• Uses user-centred design to present staged renovation in terms of what matters to people: comfort, health, lower bills, and reduced risks of future regulation.
• Tests the approach through five pilot cases in Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and Greece, each with different climates, building stocks and policy frameworks.

The platform is intended for a broad audience: homeowners, professionals, financial actors, policymakers and local authorities. It therefore doubles as a planning and decision-support tool for deep renovation.

TIMEPAC, creating Renovation Passports from EPC databases

Within the broader effort to modernise EPCs, the TIMEPAC project has produced detailed Guidelines for creating Renovation Passports from data repositories. The core idea is simple: use existing EPC registers and building databases as the backbone of Renovation Passport schemes, instead of re-collecting data from scratch.

The guidelines describe:

• how to adapt EPC databases so they can store RP content and versioning,
• ways to pre-populate passports with existing information and then refine them via audits,
• options to link passports to BIM, smart-meter data and Digital Building Logbooks, and
• governance considerations (data protection, access rules, independent control).

For Member States planning to build their RP schemes on top of Article 22 EPBD databases, TIMEPAC offers a concrete starting point.

GreenRenoV8 and the Building Renovation Passport for Ireland, integrating plans, passports and resilience

The LIFE project GreenRenoV8 addresses renovation plans and passports as part of a broader strategy for cost-effective building-stock decarbonisation and seismic resilience. It develops building archetypes, renovation packages and decision-support tools that are explicitly intended to feed into Renovation Plans and Renovation Passports, as well as National Building Renovation Plans.

In parallel, the SEAI-funded Building Renovation Passport for Ireland project (Grant Ref: 23/RDD/1027) is developing a nationally tailored BRP methodology and prototypes, with a focus on how passports can support Ireland’s path to zero-emission buildings. Together with the Irish pilots of OneClickRENO, this will provide a rich set of examples of how RP schemes can be designed around existing advisory structures and funding programmes.

RenoCOOP, citizen-led renovation, cooperative One-Stop-Shops and Renovation Passports

The LIFE project RenoCOOP focuses on how citizen-led energy cooperatives can become powerful enablers of deep renovation. It aims to refine and scale the One-Stop-Shop (OSS) services of five leading cooperatives in five EU countries, making home renovations simpler, smarter and more community-driven. Instead of supporting renovations one dwelling at a time, RenoCOOP promotes neighbourhood-scale interventions and builds on the specific strengths of cooperatives, e.g. close ties to local communities, independence from individual contractors and the ability to align renovation offers with members’ long-term interests. 

RenoCOOP’s strategy is structured around three fundamental pillars: 

• Builders: improving how cooperatives work with contractors by strengthening selection, coordination and follow-up. This is meant to reduce delays, miscommunication and unexpected costs, and to improve accountability for quality and timing.
• Neighbourhoods: shifting from a strictly house-by-house approach to collective, neighbourhood-based renovation offers, allowing cooperatives to aggregate demand, negotiate better conditions and organise work more efficiently.
• Renovation Passports: using RPs to help households plan long-term deep retrofit journeys, so that successive measures add up to fully sustainable homes before 2050 and avoid lock-in of sub-optimal steps.

Digital Building Logbooks and data infrastructure

Demo-BLog and Woningpas, logbooks as the natural home of Renovation Passports

The Horizon Europe project Demo-BLog demonstrates five Digital Building Logbooks (DBLs) at scale, involving millions of building units. It aims to show how DBLs can act as long-term digital records of building-related data, including:

• EPCs and inspection reports,
• future Renovation Passports,
• technical documents and renovation histories, and
• eventually, metered performance data.

The Flemish Woningpas is one of these pilots and demonstrates how a public, citizen-facing logbook can be integrated into existing e-government infrastructure, provide practical value to owners, and serve as a platform to host EPBD-compliant Renovation Passports.

OBSERVE and BREEZE, building-stock observatories and cost-optimal renovation data

The LIFE project OBSERVE supports several Member States in setting up national building-stock observatories, aligned with the EU Building Stock Observatory. By harmonising data collection and indicators, it lays the statistical foundation for monitoring renovation progress, MEPS compliance and, in the future, the deployment and impact of Renovation Passports.

The LIFE project BREEZE focuses on enhancing national building-energy databases and cost-optimal renovation tools in Poland, Italy and France. It harmonises stock data and develops open calculation tools that can be used to design cost-optimal renovation pathways and evaluate scenarios, feeding directly into NBRPs, MEPS and potential Renovation Passport templates.

openBEP4EU, a common building performance calculation engine for Europe

The LIFE project openBEP4EU is creating an open-source building performance calculation engine based on the CEN/ISO set of EPB standards, together with a central data hub. By harmonising calculation methods and facilitating data exchange, openBEP4EU supplies a technical backbone that can be reused by Member States in both EPC and Renovation Passport schemes, and by banks and ESCOs that wish to trust the numbers behind staged renovation roadmaps.

Renovation Passports, circularity, smartness and finance

CRedIBlE, Digital Renovation Passports and circular renovation

The Horizon Europe project CRedIBlE (Circular REDesign for a Resource-efficient, Innovative, and Transformative Built Environment) develops a digital ecosystem for circular construction and renovation, combining:

• Digital Product Passports (DPPs) for building components,
• BIM-based data structures,
• life-cycle assessment and whole-life-carbon metrics, and
• AI-driven decision-support tools.

By linking DPPs to building-level planning, CRedIBlE shows how Digital Renovation Passports can go beyond operational energy and integrate component-level sustainability and circularity indicators. BRPs informed by CRedIBlE-type tools can help owners and designers choose renovation options that optimise both operational and embodied carbon over the life cycle.

Smart readiness projects, connecting the SRI with Renovation Passports

Several LIFE projects SMARTREADY, easySRI, SMART SQUARE, SRI2MARKET and SRI-ENACT, have developed methodologies, tools and services around the Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI). Their work on smart-control functionalities, automation, demand-response and user interaction can be reflected in optional “smartness modules” within Renovation Passports, as suggested in Annex VIII.

At the same time, projects such as SmartLivingEPC, iEPB and SmarterEPC explore how EPCs, Digital Building Logbooks and smart-building data can be combined in integrated assessment frameworks. These provide models for how smartness and digitalisation can be consistently represented in both EPCs and RPs.

Financial and data-driven tools, ReLIFE and others

Projects like ReLIFE focus on the financial and service side of deep renovation, using building and renovation data to structure new financial products and advisory services. When combined with credible Renovation Passports, such tools can help banks, public funding agencies and ESCOs evaluate risk and design “pay-as-you-save” or performance-based offers that are aligned with national MEPS and ZEB trajectories.

Next-generation EPC projects as an enabling environment

A large family of Horizon and LIFE projects, ALDREN, BREEZE, BuildON, CHRONICLE, crossCert, D2EPC, E-DYCE, ePANACEA, EPBD.wise, EPC RECAST, EUB SuperHub, GreenRenoV8, iBRoad2EPC, iEPB, LEGOFIT, META BUILD, OBSERVE, openBEP4EU, QualDeEPC, SmarterEPC, SmartLivingEPC, TIMEPAC, tunES, U-CERT and X-tendo, collectively develop the next generation of EPCs and related digital tools.

Across this ecosystem, they:

• Improve EPC reliability and comparability,
• introduce new indicators for IEQ, smart readiness and operational performance,
• experiment with dynamic or digital-twin-enabled EPCs,
• integrate EPCs with BIM, logbooks and IoT data, and
• develop user-friendly formats and digital platforms.

These outputs are crucial building blocks for Renovation Passports, since passports will usually be issued in close connection with EPCs and rely on the same calculation engines, data structures and quality-assurance mechanisms.

Why this matters and how BUILD UP will keep it updated

Taken together, the national experiences and EU-funded projects described above show that renovation passports are no longer just a legal provision. They are emerging as a family of practical tools, digital platforms and advisory services that:

• give owners a clear, staged roadmap for deep renovation,
• help professionals and one-stop shops organise their services,
• provide banks and funding programmes with credible data on planned and achieved savings, and
• support Member States in delivering on NBRPs, MEPS and the path to a zero-emission building stock.

This news item is designed as a living entry point. As new project deliverables, national regulations, case studies, and BUILD UP Technical Articles and Expert Talks become available, it shall be updated with fresh examples and links.

Stakeholders are warmly invited to share additional resources (national schemes, technical reports, tools, training materials) so that BUILD UP can continue to track how RP move from policy concept to day-to-day practice across Europe.