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Tackling buildings emissions has Brussels pushing for higher renovation rates, a measure deeply unpopular with Italians who fear their cultural heritage is endangered.
Buildings are one of the EU’s biggest CO2 emitters, amounting to about one-third of the annual total. To address this, the EU institutions have long been pushing for renovations to reduce the structures’ energy consumption – culminating in the revamp of the buildings directive (EPBD). In Italy, the renovation boosting law has proven deeply unpopular.
That is because the main mechanism – the “minimum energy performance standards” – targets the worst-performing buildings of any country and requires an improvement of their energy performance. In Italy, where many buildings are both old and owned by their inhabitants, this has not sparked joy.
“We have a very large stock of residential buildings built after the Second World War and in the second part of the 20th century. That’s a huge amount of low-performing buildings that you have to focus on,” says Marco Caffi, chief of operations at the Italian Green Buildings Council.
The Italian National Institute of Statistics estimates that there are approximately 34 million homes. According to data from the institute, the average building was built in 1967, long before more energy-efficient buildings became the standard in new construction in the 1990s.
On top, Italy is home to numerous buildings of cultural value, be it the historical palaces of wealthy Venetians or the Roman museum of contemporary art, MAXXI, designed by Zaha Hadid. But there are also many large buildings that serve no cultural purpose.
When it comes to renovations, it makes sense to start there. “Large buildings are often managed by large companies or large organisations, whose business plans take into account the energy and other resource consumption scenarios of their buildings,” explains Caffi.
“The ownership structure of large commercial buildings facilitates improvement actions of energy efficiency. Without incentives, it is certainly more difficult to act on the single building owned by the single citizen,” he added.
Historic buildings, on the other hand, would need to be handled much more carefully.
Cultural value vs energy efficiency
The 60,000 protected buildings form an integral part of the Italian people’s understanding of their country and history – prompting the existing alarm in the face of renovation plans.
“We just have to be careful not to lose the cultural value of our heritage what we have because of energy standards,” explains Valentina Marino, an expert advisor at the Green Buildings Council.
Exemptions for protected buildings, and those in the process of being awarded protection, are expected to feature prominently in the buildings directive revamp – a direct response to these concerns.
But protection brings its own burdens for the buildings’ owners.
“In Italy, to operate on historic buildings, the authorisation of the superintendence of cultural heritage and architectural heritage is required, which issues a specific permit,” the Italian expert Caffi explains. “Often the constraints are very strict” and make it difficult to “apply solutions to improve the efficiency of the building envelope”, he added.
Successful case study
One project with some reference value may be the changes made to the Fondazione Prada, a museum founded in 1993 in Milan. It was built into and around an old distillery from 1910.
Nonetheless, the building managed to maintain the cultural value of its architectural bones while upping the energy performance of the museum. “The walls and windows of the existing buildings have been maintained to preserve the typical characteristics of the historic industrial building,” explains Caffi.
Instead, “efficiency was achieved with systems that use a very high-efficiency geothermal heat pump, LED lamps for lighting and a top-level building management and automation system,” he added.
“It is true that it is not possible to achieve all the requirements in terms of energy performance on a protected building, but it is equally true that protected buildings are not the entire Italian building stock,” notes Marino.
“I don’t think it would block the implementation of the EPBD in Italy at all.”
“In the process of making the building stock more efficient, it is important to define priorities,” says Caffi.
“We need to focus on where we have the most important energy consumption in terms of absolute consumption and emissions.”
Aside from the many residential buildings, that is likely to mean large buildings that see a lot of use on a daily basis. Focusing on “commercial and community buildings like schools, hospitals, and public buildings which are used intensively for most of the day and of the year” may be more sensible, he added.
“Perhaps it makes no sense to devote a great effort to trying to improve buildings such as the Stadio Olimpico in Rome in the short term, given their occasional use.”
[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald and Benjamin Fox]
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