New challenges for energy certification of dwellings – we keep on learning

Dries Maes and Guy Vekemans, VITO, Belgium

Keywords

energy certification and labelling, existing dwellings, training, building energy statistics

Abstract

In many European countries energy certification of existing dwellings is in an early stage of application. What have we learnt till now?

Four main issues arise: how can we make the procedures less expensive and thus more acceptable for society, how can we nevertheless assure quality, how can we further improve the training of experts and finally what to do with the large amount of building and energy data resulting from energy certification?

These issues are addressed on the basis of recent (2005-2006) field experience in Belgium. Over 300 energy experts have been trained in the last 2 years, feed-back information was evaluated. In addition the quality of the audits was controlled by several at random on-site check ups. Since the number of audits performed is limited, a quality evaluation is not yet possible, but certainly worthwhile in the near future, also with respect to experiences in other countries.

At the same time the cost of the audits was very high and strongly dependant from expert to expert. This was a major drawback for the implementation. Therefore an analysis is on-going in which the balance between cost and accuracy is re-evaluated. Some time-saving tools are discussed.

Finally a concept has been developed to process the large amount of valuable data resulting from the energy certification. Data from energy certification can be highly valuable for other studies and government policy programs. This last issue is being developed in the framework of an EIE-project called DATAMINE.