Characteristics of a database for energy performance certificates

Funded reconstruction and newly constructed buildings are bound on the issue of an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) in Austria. Due to that fact, there is a large pool of EPC. For the county Salzburg around 51.000 EPC are listed in the so called ZEUS database by the effective date 31.12.2016. A focus of the study is the examination of the reconstruction's impact on the buildings energy relevant values and evaluation of the characteristics of the database. In context of the examination of the reconstruction's impact, those buildings for which both an EPC before and after reconstruction is available, are filtered and statistical analyzed. Before the statistical evaluation a plausibility check of the EPC was done. Based on this pre-check there are plenty of fmdings where problems occurred during the generation of the EPC as well as in the structure of ZEUS. The amount of EPC in ZEUS will increase steadily. Hence in the future there will be a much higher amount of EPC available for such statistical analysis. To improve the quality of the database and the opportunities to generate insights from the data, the knowledge of this statistical analysis is taken into account for the further development of ZEUS. Thereby the focus is to determine which variables should be implemented in the database in the future. As example the layers of all the structural components of buildings should be listed in the database. Hence in the future it will be possible to monitor a high amount of EPC where building components have changed in the context of reconstruction. A general aim is the development of a database which can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the different funding systems in the field of reconstruction and adaption of the building technology. Consequently, the custody of EPC and statistical analysis will be available as basis for political decisions. (C) 2017 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.