New qualitative approach based on data analysis of European building stock and retrofit market

The huge amount of energy consumed by the residential buildings makes the sector one of the principal sources affecting the energy use in the European countries. To face it, the renovation of the building stock is considered one of the key strategies to improve the energy performance of buildings and meet the energy efficiency targets. Thus, a full understanding of the building stock and renovation market is crucial to meet the objectives of energy efficiency strategies. This research presents the findings of an extensive research on the residential building stock and retrofit market in France, Italy, Spain, Slovenia and Austria and a detailed comparative analysis is developed to assess the quality and the level of the data sources. The weighting method is adopted in this paper as an analytic approach in order to evaluate the main indicators of the data collected and to highlight the commonalities and the differences of building data among European countries. The results of this analysis are considered as valuable vademecum aims to support the experts and the different stakeholders in the data collection process and initiates the opportunities for standardizing data collected from European countries. This research is a part of a European project H2020 (heartproject.eu).