Using the building certification methodology of another country: What have we learned?

Poster contributed to World Sustainable Energy Days, Wels, Austria, 5-8 March 2024

The results focused on the experiment on building energy performance certificates (EPCs). The process of applying one country's certification methodology to buildings from another country has been challenging due to differences in climate data, language and terms, and treatment of certain building elements and features such as thermal bridges or user behaviour in the energy rating calculation. 

The comparison of the results obtained with the EPC methodologies of the testing countries and hosting countries for the same building has shown a consistency of the EPC results across Europe that is better than the initial expectations. In the journey to carry out the cross testing, many difficulties have had to be overcome, and hypotheses and estimates had to be made to apply certifications from hosting countries to testing buildings. For these reasons, conflicting results were expected from EPC methodologies from different countries. 

The consistency of EPC results across Europe is relevant when defining common building renovation policies in the EU based on the energy classes of the building stock. The labels standardize the numerical values obtained, harmonizing the results among countries.