EUBUCCO: Modelling European Union’s Buildings Contribution to Climate Objectives

Aims

To meet its climate targets, the European Union (EU) must take swift and comprehensive action to decarbonize the building sector. Buildings are responsible for about 40% of the EU’s energy consumption, which makes it the sector with the largest share.To design decarbonization policies, however, spatially resolved data with a wide scope would be needed, that go beyond city-scale case studies or economy-wide modelling. Such data would allow for more precise design of policy measures, which are tailored to information at the building level for entire countries and regions.

In this project:

  1. We are generating a building-level database for the entire EU residential building stock. The database, which will include more than 200 million buildings, will be generated by aggregating and harmonizing existing data, using machine learning techniques to fill data gaps.

  2. We are developing a model that combines large scale and high granularity to estimate the energy demand for heating and cooling of residential buildings in the EU by 2050 under different climate scenarios. We apply a reduced-order building energy model based on a well-established ISO 52016:2017 standard and use a probabilistic approach to characterize the uncertainties in the model assumptions.

In its first implementation, our model will estimate the energy demand for heating and cooling buildings at the EU level using outdoor temperature, with the ability to zoom in to specific regions. This can be used, for example, to estimate the mesoscopic impact of changing climate on energy demand. The model also aims to provide a basis for future fine-grained cost-benefit analyses of decarbonization options for the EU building stock, as more data on specific building components become available.

Scientific publications from the project

Conference presentations about the project

Current team

Past contributors