The alliance for deep renovation in buildings (ALDREN) aims to provide a holistic procedure for the potential buyer, investor, renter or user of the building, to assess the overall benefits from deep building renovation and providing relevant data about achievable energy-efficiency up to near Zero Energy Building and good quality indoor environment parameters to ensure healthy indoor environments in buildings.
The ALDREN project aims to evaluate the link between low-energy renovation and the quality of indoor environments, and calculated versus actual energy performance by linking the energy certificate with the actual energy measured. ALDREN will also define indoor environmental quality (IEQ) rating and the benefits resulting from higher IEQ in the financial valuation of the deep energy renovation projects.
A roadmap for when, where and how to renovate
ALDREN aims to explore and asses existing initiatives, such as Energy Performance Certificates, in a detail analysis presents updated evaluations and comparisons of existing applications in buildings, and to highlight the main known barriers and lesson learned on the standardisation of BRP across the EU. The result will provide a vision foresight, a path to follow, the so-called ALDREN roadmap and performance tools for renovation, and clearly describing "when, where and how to renovate" to achieve the near Zero Energy Building objectives.
The ALDREN alliance gathers relevant target groups and key actors of the in-depth renovation process, such as building owners, financial institutions, certification bodies, building experts, universities and end-users. Among numerous European experts are Frank Hovorka from building industry, Jaap Hogeling from building professionals and Pawel Wargocki from the Technical University of Denmark.
EU policies for renovation and energy savings
Renovation of the existing building stock is essential to address climate change and achieve energy performance, as the world's buildings stock consumes approximately 40% of energy and emits about 1/3 of total greenhouse gas emissions. While about 2% of new buildings are built each year, and a comparable amount is being renovated, most opportunities to improve energy efficiency over the next few decades will be in the existing building stock, most of which are constrained by old equipment, ageing structures and inadequate maintenance.
The European Union is committed to developing sustainable and decarbonised energy systems by 2050. And the improved energy efficiency in existing buildings represents a high-volume and low-cost approach to reducing energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.