Dynamic EU building stock knowledge hub - BuiltHub
“Dynamic EU building stock knowledge hub - BuiltHub" is a 4-year European Project funded under the Horizon 2020 programme of the European Union.
The project seeks to develop a roadmap to continuously enhance the data needed to decide on building-related policy and business for involved stakeholders through a community and its data hub. It seeks to positively disrupt policy and market decision-making through a continuously community-enhanced evidence base.
The BuiltHub community and its platform will change the way knowledge on the EU building stock is developed and shared, and represent the full range of building stakeholders from across Europe.
The project
The EU-funded BuiltHub project will define a roadmap and vision for a durable data flow to characterise the EU building stock and support its decarbonisation. For this purpose, the project will develop an organised and inclusive data collection method in a easy-to-access-and-use datahub platform. The web-based BuiltHub platform will ensure and support a long-lasting data flow through a benefits-based engagement strategy of potential beneficiaries and users such as data and metadata providers and simple users. The strategy will be applied through the development of value information services around data transformation and interpretation tailored to platform users.
In addition to developing the roadmap and platform, the project is concerned with fostering a Europe-wide community interested in knowledge about the EU building stock and its transition. BuiltHub is therefore going to collect aggregated data on building stock performance. To collect data of use to stakeholders and the community, and to develop useful, evolving services, BuiltHub needs to engage stakeholders to determine their needs and get their feedback on the offered products and services.
In a nutshell, BuiltHub aims to create the basis for a rapid and cost-effective building stock transformation by:
- developing a resilient and durable data exchange platform allowing to feed in or extract data for designing more effective building sustainability and renovation policies, programmes, projects and financing schemes;
- enabling responsible and reliant building performance data collection and flows;
- defining a standardised data management approach for a reliable building stock status and progress analysis;
- bring together relevant actors, projects, initiatives, data holders and users, as well as other interested stakeholders and establish an active community of data users.
Strategic positioning of BuiltHub vis-a-vis the Building Stock Observatory and its sister projects MATRYCS, BIGG and BEYOND.
The policy context
The European Commission’s efforts to design effective policies for buildings, following the EU’s 2050 target of climate-neutrality and the European Green Deal, hinge on detailed knowledge of building stock properties and behaviour. This detailed knowledge of building stock features and performance has the potential to positively disrupt policymaking and market design targeting buildings. However, this can be challenging to manage, considering the lack of comprehensive and reliable data on the EU buildings. To achieve this, BuiltHub will develop a structured and inclusive dataflow ─ inflow to BuiltHub and outflow back to stakeholders ─ as well as an easy to access and use datahub, in the shape of an online platform.
An improved data set will enable more accurate reflection of the building stock, and could also mean deeper granularity in its analysis, potentially taking more aspects into account, such as nearly Zero-Energy Buildings, smart-readiness and renewable energy generation. A shared data set will also support better comparability amongst modelling results. Modelling results in turn help decision makers aggregate existing data and information by calculating potential results of their decision making.
The BuiltHub project objectives and results are strategically linked to numerous European energy efficiency, policy and research frameworks and strategies. As a Horizon 2020 project, BuiltHub will contribute to the successful implementation of named key directives and EU policies. Of particular relevance are:
- Energy Performance in Buildings Directive 2010/31/EU
- Energy Efficiency Directive 2012/27/EU
- Renewable Energy Directive 2018/2001
- Renovation Wave (COM) 2020/662
As BuiltHub is a project related to subjects including data, Big Data, and the interaction of various data sources the following EU policies are of high relevance: