International Webinar

On 29 April 2024, the international webinar of transFORMAT-LINK was held, together with the Spanish project RETABIT.

Summary:

This online workshop was organised by SERA Institute (https://sera.global/) as part of the transFORMAT-LINK project, funded by the Austrian Climate and Energy Fund and being carried out as part of the "ACRP - 14th Call, 2022" programme. Focus was on the projects transFORMAT-LINK and RETABIT.  

• transFORMAT-LINK: Supporting the creation and revision of municipal development concepts, while linking them to the objectives of the NECP: Tools for municipal planning practice, project implementation and reporting (https://transformat.at/en)
• RETABIT: Developing multi-dimensional data driven services to foster residential building retrofitting programmes in the implementation of SECAPs (https://retabit.es/)

Other projects with a similar focus were also given the opportunity to give short presentations, and colleagues from REScoop
(https://www.rescoop.eu/) joined us to inform about the latest activities in the field of one-stop shops for citizen-led building renovation. The presentations formed the basis for discussions which focused on the following aspects:

• It was agreed that there are gaps between the planning level of the EU Member States and the regions and municipalities in terms of coherent planning and implementation of projects. This is a common problem and not unique to Austria. Data is needed for planning and reporting and this needs to be collected and documented consistently.
• While transFORMAT-LINK focuses on municipalities and their legal frameworks and relies on standardisation and as many pre-settings as possible to reduce the user's workload, RETABIT offers the user a variety of assessment options and follows the approach that the respective administrative level or unit selects the appropriate indicators for analysis.
• The RETABIT approach focuses on the existing building stock and allows the identification of target areas for renovation based on energy, social and environmental indicators. This is very important in the context of the requirements of the new version of the EPBD. In fact, RETABIT offers solutions for some of the new legal requirements.
• transFORMAT-LINK is much broader in scope and focuses on renewable energy production. The building stock is only superficially addressed and can greatly benefit from the RETABIT approach. However, in order to reduce the burden on users and to harmonise approaches across Austria, we would prefer to pre-select certain indicators and integrate the resulting map as a GIS layer in the transFORMAT-LINK drawing tool, rather than leaving it up to the user to decide which indicators to select for assessment.
• RETABIT uses various data sources, including cadastral and energy performance certificate databases, to characterise buildings with relevant information such as energy consumption, building age, income class, access to infrastructure and green spaces. On this basis, informative maps are produced to support the decision-making process for building refurbishment plans. As the underlying databases are updated, the data for the maps must also be updated. Preparing the data requires considerable effort, which cannot be managed on the side and certainly cannot be imposed on users. A dedicated budget is required to engage an organisation to provide this service to the administration.
• It was agreed that user involvement is crucial to the success of such tools and platforms. What are the levers to get users interested? On the one hand, these are concerns or projects in the local area or legal obligations. Attempts should be made to link such tools with other platforms that offer a high service factor for the target group and that are easy to use and already well known.

The speakers:

Susanne Geissler, Peter Wallisch (SERA global GmbH - Institute for Sustainable Energy and Resources Availability, Vienna, Austria) https://sera.global/

Leandro Madrazo, Alvaro Sicilia, Adirane Calvo (Research Group ARC, Engineering and Architecture LaSalle Barcelona Campus Ramon Llull University, Barcelona, Spain) https://www.salleurl.edu/en/arc

Felix Kriedemann, Srgjan Vidoeski (REScoop.eu - the European federation of citizen energy cooperatives) https://www.rescoop.eu/