The challenges for a holistic, flexible and through-life updated energy performance certificate

One of the strategies proposed by the recently approved version of the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive recast is to provide the Member States with more reliable, accurate, and digitalised Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs), the so-called next-generation or enhanced EPCs. Currently, end-users perceive the EPC as just an administrative obligation for buying or renting a building. The data in the certificates provide limited energy-related information and lack accuracy. Moreover, they cannot account for the continuous changes that occur throughout building lifetime. The overcoming of the EPC limitations is the main objective of the research activity conducted within the framework of Next Generation EPC Horizon2020 cluster. At this regard, the EU-Horizon2020 TIMEPAC project is going to contribute to the enhancement of the entire process of generating, storing, analysing, and exploiting EPCs. The premise is that the building is no longer conceived as a static entity, but as an occupant-centric object, subject to continuous changes. Therefore, the enhanced EPC approach should be holistic, flexible, through-life updatable, and interoperable. In this work, the main methodologies and tools proposed in the TIMEPAC project for the enhancement of the existing EPC schema in terms of EPC generation, exploitation, and data quality are presented and discussed.