Political awareness is finally recognizing the significance of building renovation in Mediterranean areas as climate change stretches energy vulnerable households. Nevertheless, without entitling the intermediate sections of decision making with usable information, the real necessities get lost in the data void. 

Nowadays local data from energy consumption patterns, urban morphology, accessibility, economic distribution, among others, are easily generated but poorly organized and interpreted by their owners. There is an urgent need to deploy tools to link the different household multidimensional data, as well as to extract knowledge from them at a local level. Plus, being able to compare and visualize the impacts of applied measures is key to identifying the urgent causes and to achieve time & cost-effective decisions. 

The RETABIT project emerges from this pressurized reality to try to relieve local authorities in regard to data management, situation reporting and actuation paths. Thus, the objective is to create a bottom up process data driven service platform, which facilitates the evaluation of urban areas and their potential to renovation through building retrofitting, for the park decarbonization.  The platform can help the stakeholder to have a better understanding on identifying critical and vulnerable groups of buildings at a local level; besides it can allow for prioritization of the retrofitting actions linked to the renovation wave, considering different optimization criteria, from economics to human wellbeing.

RETABIT uses a grey box simulation engine that processes real data to calculate energetic, economic and social outputs for the actual building park situation, while it also predicts the future scenario after implementing a pack of retrofitting solutions. Furthermore, these outputs are designed to feed a series of KPIs in line with the Sustainable Energy Access and Climate Action Plans (SECAPs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework. These would help platform users to monitor, interpret and gather valuable information for the city records.

Throughout the process, the RETABIT platform’s methods and tools will be applied in demonstration scenarios with the participation of the regional government, relevant stakeholders, and end-users from Barcelona municipalities. RETABIT, is an empowering renovation instrument, which La Salle (University and technology center) and the LOCALISED partner IREC (Catalan Research Center) have been elaborating since 2021. To this day, the project’s development is halfway through.   

More information can be found in the following link: https://retabit.es

Measures introduced in Barcelona City – LOCALISED partner – since 2015 to boost sustainable mobility and cut the number of vehicles generating emissions have led to better air quality and a 31% reduction in air pollution. The growth of the bike lane network, the rollout of the superblock project, the switch to electric vehicles for the municipal fleet and the implementation of the low emission zone have demonstrated the effectiveness of a model which prioritises people’s health and environmental sustainability.

Data collected from air quality monitoring stations in the last eight years show a steady drop in NO₂ emissions. These measuring points making up Catalonia’s air-quality monitoring network are managed in the city by the Barcelona Public Health Agency (ASPB) and can be consulted online on the Barcelona air quality map.

The stations are located at strategic points which represent the areas with the highest volumes of traffic (traffic stations) and the areas with the lowest intensity of traffic (general stations). A reduction in air pollution has been observed in both cases:

• Traffic stations: NO₂ emissions averaged 55 points in 2015, while this year’s figure puts them 28 points, a drop of 31%.
• General stations: NO₂ emissions at these stations averaged 38 points in 2015, while this year’s figure puts then at 25 points, a drop of 34%.

A healthier and more sustainable city model

The improvement in air quality comes after the city embraced measures to change its urban planning and mobility model. The reduction in the last eight years is not the result of one specific measure, but rather a set of coordinated steps with common goals.

A key factor in promoting sustainable mobility has been the new orthogonal bus network and the expansion of the metro network as far as La Marina. The growth in the bike lane network has seen this reach 240 kilometres in all, resulting in 56% more bike journeys and over 58,000 new routes.

The changes to the urban environment have also helped incentivise journeys on foot, with more friendly streets and more space for pedestrians. The implementation of the Barcelona Superblock and the “Protecting Schools” programme have transformed key spaces for neighbourhood life, with significant improvements in health and air quality thanks to the reduction in traffic.

The activation of the Low Emission Zone (LEZ) has meant a reduction of 600,000 journeys by vehicles which pollute the most. The gradual switch to electric vehicles for the municipal fleet of the City Police and cleaning and waste collection vehicles has also helped cut pollutant emissions.

The COVID-19 crisis has changed the dynamics of some jobs, with the implementation of teleworking maintained since the return to normality. Estimates put the percentage of the population teleworking before the pandemic at 4%. The forecast is for that figure to double, with a stable teleworking population of up to 8%.

The LOCALISED partner, CMCC has published a paper in the journal of Frontiers in Chemical Engineering where it has developed a game theoretical framework to analyse and understand the interaction among the key players in the EU’s climate and energy policy making domain in case emerging technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere such as direct air capture (DAC) becomes commercially available.

The model is capable of adjusting for different energy market conditions such as the monopolistic behaviour of Russia while supplying natural gas to the EU as well as the growing reliance of major EU countries such as Germany on domestic coal.

The game theory model considers two scenarios of full-cooperation among the EU member states and full-competition among them. It reveals interesting some insights into how carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies can affect energy security and climate change policies at the EU level.

First, if the natural gas markets are competitive and not dominated by one major player such as Russia, cooperation or competition among the EU member states will not change the incentives to deploy considerable levels of DAC to achieve climate stability targets. Nevertheless, full-cooperation among the EU member states means stronger incentives for climate change mitigation and therefore, less reliance on domestic coal, the most polluting source of energy. However, in the absence of alternative renewable energies, less coal means more natural gas and more dependency on foreign energy sources.

Second, if the natural gas market is dominated by a major player like Russia, the decisions of the EU member states to coordinate and align their climate and energy policies can influence the foreign supplier’s choice of natural gas export price. In this case, full-cooperation sends a strong signal to the supplier that the EU is committed to reducing its GHG emissions and therefore, replacing dirtier domestic coal with cleaner imported natural gas. This motivates the supplier to set a higher price for natural gas in this case but at the same time encourages the Eu to invest more in DAC to reach its climate targets. Competition among the EU member states on the other hand, forces the monopolistic supplier to offer lower gas prices to dissuade the EU countries from switching to domestic coal. In this case, DAC deployment is reduced as the stringency of any EU climate policy is jeopardised by competition among member states to meet their domestic energy demands.

In short, this analysis highlights the need for aligning the development of emerging mitigation technologies such as DAC with local mitigation and energy procurement efforts in achieving climate stabilisation targets.

The Renovation Wave (RW) initiative has been designed by the European Union (EU) to tackle the dual problem of economic growth and energy saving in the building sector. In particular, it aims to double the annual energy renovation rate throughout the EU by 2030 and to foster deep energy renovations. As a result, such interventions could inevitably not only stimulate economic growth by creating new jobs and new demands for renovation but also foster the EU’s contribution to sustainable development goals (SDGs) through the implementation of Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAPs) before 2030.

As part of the LOCALISED project, researchers at CMCC in collaboration with IREC, PIK, IMP, and Julich developed a framework for analysing RW programs in four selected countries: Italy, Spain, Poland, and Germany. They analysed information including duration of the program, funding size, target groups (designated recipients), coverage (national or regional), and as a conclusion, whether the adoption of these programs leads to structural change or not. Table 1 shows the comparative statistics about the RW programs in each country. As shown here, most programs in these 4 countries are short-term (1-3 years) with medium budget (between 201 and 999 million of Euro) and targeted towards municipalities as the main recipient.

Table 1: general information about the programs

Next, researchers focused on specific interventions in each program and tried to link them to the LOCALISED Mitigation/Adaptation database, and also to relevant sustainable development goals (SDGs) and Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plans (SECAPs)  initiatives through specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Figure 1: the most frequent SDGs per country

The findings of this research summarised in Figure 1, indicate that Renovation Wave programs at the national level offer a strong link to SDGs and specifically SDG 7  which aims at ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy, is present in 92% of the analysed  programs.

The two other commonly linked SDGs (SDG 11 and SDG 9) focus on making cities and human settlements, building resilient infrastructure, promoting sustainable industrialization, and fostering innovation.

In terms of SECAP KPIs (Figure 2), it’s been shown that mitigation pillar (24%), energy consumption  pillar (22%) and energy poverty pillar (19%)  can be identified as the ones most relevant to the national RW programs.

Figure 2: the most frequent SECAPs per country