While EU policy assigns a primary role to Energy Efficiency (EE), the lack of a holistic understanding of the impact of EE investments has hindered its integration in the policy-making process. Coordination between demand and supply side of energy policy is not targeted, and there is need to gather the evidence on the benefits of EE in ecological and socio-economic terms as well as on its interactions with the broader policy context and energy market. The EERAdata project aims to address this challenge by supporting policy decisions and related stakeholders with an organic set of instruments to prioritise investments in energy efficiency in the context of the European building stock and its potential for renovation. The EERAdata project will develop and test a decision-support tool to help local administrations in the collection and processing of their building and demographic data towards an assessment and prioritization of EE measures in planning, renovating and constructing buildings. The tool will be operationalized through a software application capable of merging data from various sources, formats and fields, which will then model and assess the impact of energy efficiency investment in buildings across several categories of impact, and against a range of supply-side measures. Partner municipalities will participate to the design of the tool and test its application in regional pilots. The pilots will be part of a wider process of stakeholder engagement aimed at ensuring the usefulness of the different instruments, their applicability across different geographical and economic contexts, and its adoption beyond the life-span of the project. To this end, the project team will establish regional networks of stakeholders centred around the partner municipalities. These networks will be engaged throughout the project to bridge the gap between demand- and supply-side of energy policy.

SMARTeeSTORY will propose an integrated building automation and control systems for monitoring and optimizing building energy performance according to an innovative multi-domain approach (integrating SRI domains: HVAC, Dynamic Faade, Lighting, EV), incorporating historical building requirements as well as human requirements by envisaging real-time and active user engagement. SMARTeeSTORY system will automatically detect (interacting with users via specific technologies identified in project early stages, e.g. smart home systems) the building users archetypes (via DRL algorithms) therefore specific preferences (SMARTeeSTORY database of users archetypes and preferences in smart buildings energy demand, comfort, etc.) informing the optimization and control services. Such a system will encompass interoperable and cyber-secure software (cloud-based middleware provided with multiple services for: monitoring & digital twin, analysis and prediction, optimization and control, embedding physics and data-based models for forecasting building energy performance and using Digital Building Logbook as a Common Data Environment) and hardware (advanced edge computers, multi-protocols data gateways, smart and automated sun blinds, smart sensors and actuators for Technical Building Systems integrated control according to occupancy and energy efficiency needs, smart products for user engagement) solutions fully enabling the three functionalities required for a building to become smart: i) optimization of operation of technical building systems, ii) adapting to the external environment (including energy grids), changing condition in relation to demands from building occupants. The system will be deployed at TRL 8 in three demo sites (non-residential historic buildings) identified in Latvia, Spain and The Netherlands to demonstrate buildings improved energy performance in correlation to the increased smartness rating.

The EXCESS project builds up on nearly-zero energy multi-storey building (consumption below primary energy threshold) residential concepts of the main 4 EU climatic zones towards Energy fleXible user-CEntric poSitive houseS (EXCESS). EXCESS defines a positive energy building (PEB) as a building that produces more energy than they use, with high RES self- consumption rate (instead of using the grid for solving seasonal balancing issues) over a time span of one year. RES and smart technologies exist, but complete packages for different climates do not. Important technical developments for plus energy building materials and other individual technologies are required to address specific climate related needs in order to meet the PEB level; especially in harsh climates. Integration is needed for upgrading single technologies to be part of a large orchestra enabling also user-context-aware energy flexible services between utilities and customers (selling flexibility). These will unlock additional revenue streams that reduce the lifetime cost of the developed PEB solutions, making them affordable also large portion of the society. Thus, EXCESS will advance new materials, technologies and integrated technological systems (TRL5-7) promoting a user centric approach (building tenants), capitalized on new ICT opportunities, for optimizing the interplay of local generation, storage, consumption at the building and district level. The demonstration activities in each of the climatic zones (Austria, Belgium, Finland and Spain) will be accompanied by co-innovation, replication and exploitation activities to maximize the project technical, social and economic impact and to prepare for a future market roll out of the PEB concept by also scouting energy efficiency funding opportunities.