Final report on data gathering and user operation

The aim of this report is to explain how the testing in operation phase has been carried out in two pilots, one in Spain and one in Bulgaria. These pilots present notable differences in terms of scope and leadership, technical issues and strategies adopted. These differences are explained below.

The scope of the pilot in Spain has been buildings and data from the Government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya), a large, regional level, public organization, made up of multiple departments and entities, that manages more than 4.000 public buildings, and applies unified sustainability and energy efficiency criteria. In contrast, the pilot in Bulgaria involves data gathered from smaller, local level, municipalities, covering a variety of local public organizations, which tend to have their own, individual, specific and diverse, energy efficiency targets.

The Spanish pilot, has been led by the organization itself, Generalitat de Catalunya, through the technical team of the Energy Institute of Catalonia (ICAEN). In contrast, the Bulgarian pilot has been led by EnEffect, a non-profit organization that supports municipalities in meeting the country's energy objectives. Both leaders have had to supervise the data gathering with the support of CIMNE as technical developer team of the platform EN-TRACK.

Because of these differences, as well as differing technical issues, such as data collection and management strategies, or user profiles, this report devotes a chapter to each pilot in order to go deeper in each case (Chapter 2 and Chapter 3). The following issues are addressed in both chapters:

1. Identification and registration of users
2. Identification and registration of buildings
3. Recording and monitoring: energy consumption
4. Register of energy efficiency measures
5. Registration of energy certificates and audits

The strategy followed in each pilot was different and was developed to adapt the testing to the pilot-specific operational functionalities. These strategies relate to successfully identifying potential users and to the task of gathering, enter and upload new data into the system. The descriptions of the strategies documented elaborate on the difficulties and challenges encountered during the testing phase for each of the issues in the list above.

Finally, in chapter 4, documents another important aspect covered during the pilot phase: continuous user engagement. To ensure successful implementation of the pilot and testing of the platform, it has been necessary to cooperate firstly with end users, mainly building owners or building energy managers, and secondly with financial institutions. To do so, key aspects such as user engagement strategy and communications channels have been evaluated and are defined in this concluding chapter.