New EBENTO project helps citizens to identify energy efficiency improvements in housing
On 10th October 2022, the new Horizon Europe project EBENTO, focused on demonstrating integrated technology solutions for buildings with performance guarantees, was launched with an overall budget of around €5.9 million and set for 3 years. This project, coordinated by ETRA, will be driven by a consortium of 11 partners in 7 countries throughout Europe. Two of them Laboratory of Energy Policy and The Institute for Innovation and Development are from the University of Ljubljana.
EBENTO, which stands for “Energy efficiency building enhancement through performance guarantee tools”, aims at developing an integrated platform for all actors involved in building and renovation sector to provide one-stop-shop platform to better coordinate and manage Energy Performance Contracting (EPC), bringing together the needs from all actors involved in enhancing the building stock.
EBENTO focuses on the citizens as key players of the energy transition, helping them in their decision-making to invest in energy efficiency. Both public institutions and energy communities, supported by SMEs and Energy Service Companies, will be able to identify potential energy efficiency improvements in residential housing stock, reduce the administrative procedures and making possible public-private partnerships to attract investment and reduce upfront costs.
Thanks to this platform, new business models for optimizing the financial resources available will be validated. In this sense, the best financing and collaboration schemes to set up energy services will be explored but also it will study how to enhance current EPCs for Demand Side Mechanism services and what kind of investment options will increase the amount of energy efficiency projects in the city/region.
By using digital tools, EBENTO will gather data from EPCs, financial schemes, devices monitoring, energy savings, building information modelling, users’ opinions, and comfort levels, among others to give to the citizens the required trust for investing in new solutions, and to companies the relevant information to reduce costs and easily replicate the work developed.
EBENTO results will be tested and validated in 4 demonstrators in Spain, Greece, Estonia and UK, involving 35 small residential buildings, and more than 80 final users and different actors’ perspectives from, for example a Public Institution, a Cooperative and a Utility.
EBENTO ecosystem will be an essential cornerstone in facing the current gaps for the uptake and acceleration of building renovation projects- high capital costs, administrative burdens, financing and subsidies mainly available only for large renovations projects with good payback periods. The project innovations will make possible to low-income households (and mostly for energy poverty households) afford not only small-scale interventions, but also deep renovations.