Deep Renovation of the European building stock adopting Plug-and-Play solutions

The building sector has been identified as one of the key sectors to achieve the 20/20/20 targets of the European Union in consideration to the fact that buildings count for 40% of the EU’s energy consumption, 36% of its CO2 emissions and 55% of its electricity consumption. Ninety percent of the existing building stock in Europe was built before 1990 and have reached the age for renovation. Therefor exist an urgent need for a significant improvement of energy efficiency through ‘Deep renovation’. Deep renovation is defined by the EU-Energy Efficiency Directive 2012/27/EU as refurbishment technical interventions which should address cost-effective deep renovations reducing the final energy consumption of a building by a significant percentage compared with the pre-renovation levels leading to a very high energy performance. The paper introduces the innovative methodology (4M - Mapping, Modelling, Making and Monitoring) and techniques regarding the ‘Deep renovation’ of the European building stock promoted by the P2ENDURE project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program grant number 723391. The project goal is to apply and monitor, on specific demo-cases, cost-effectiveness and energy efficiency renovating strategies proposing Plug-and-Play (PnP) solutions in consideration of fast on-site assembly, user-friendliness, reduction of construction errors. The prefab PnP technologies proposed regards building and MEP-HVAC components and are supported by Building Information Modelling to overcome the main barriers of deep renovation inside the building process.