Articles

What if technology allowed buildings to manage themselves, guaranteeing greater energy efficiency, enhanced comfort, and improved health while quickly paying for themselves through savings on bills? This is already happening—smart buildings are a reality, with various projects demonstrating their advantages.

Industrialisation and digital knowledge sharing provide a strategic path to accelerating building renovation in Europe. The INFINITE project demonstrates how these approaches address key challenges while ensuring sustainable and scalable outcomes.

As renovation rates remain low across most of Europe, engineers are seeking more convenient and efficient methods to enhance the energy efficiency of buildings. This article explores a modern renovation method that uses prefabricated panels to insulate a building’s envelope more effectively, helping to save energy and reduce heating costs.

Traditional renovation methods often prove slow and disruptive. One effective approach is industrialised renovation, which leverages methods such as automation, digitalisation, standardisation, mass production, and prefabrication to reduce emissions, ensure higher precision, cut costs, and accelerate onsite assembly.

Let’s have a closer look at the significance of historic buildings. Why is it crucial to prioritise their refurbishment, and what challenges do these projects typically encounter, making them so complex to manage?

This article briefly presents the H2020 SUREFIT project’s innovative solutions developed to improve residential buildings energy conservation measures and indoor air quality through retrofitting, aiming for near-zero energy buildings.

A sustainable society is one that protects the environment while fostering conditions that promote the mental and physical well-being of all its members. In the building sector, this means creating structures that are energy-efficient, low-emission and healthy and comfortable. But can health and comfort be ensured while still ensuring sustainable use of resources?

Europe’s renovation of building stock, facilitated by digitalisation and paradigm shifts, can ensure sustainability, efficiency, and equity within ecological planetary boundaries. Estonian digitalisation initiatives streamline renovation processes by improving data accuracy and supporting renovation planning and decision-making, thus accelerating energy-efficient upgrades and aligning building stock transformation with broader European sustainability goals.

Exploiting data through innovative services can significantly enhance the energy and environmental performance assessment of the building stock. Key factors for success include data availability, accessibility, and quality. Within the H2020 TIMEPAC project, emphasis has been placed on enhancing the usability, reliability, and enrichment of Energy Performance Certificate data to effectively support urban-scale energy analysis.

SmartWins leverages digital twins to optimise building energy performance, integrate Life Cycle Assessments, and foster collaboration through research, education, and tools, advancing sustainability and carbon-neutral goals across Europe.