Software solution to design energy-efficient retrofitting projects at district scale

The EU strategies to reduce carbon dioxide emissions highlight the importance of renovating the existing building stock. It is one of the most contributing sectors to these undesired emissions to the atmosphere. The business-as-usual practices for designing energy-efficient retrofitting projects are still too time consuming and imprecise, and their supporting tools are not interconnected, provoking a lack of trust within the sector, particularly from investors. There is a need to improve these practices by reducing the errors and the time required to evaluate retrofitting alternatives to select the most appropriate according to the stakeholders’ priorities. To address this gap, the Optimised Energy Efficient Design Platform for Refurbishment at District Level (OptEEmAL) solution enables the automatic generation of scenarios of energy conservation measures and their simulation and optimisation, based on data provided by the users. This solution automatically launches and connects the processes that the different stakeholders usually carry out in a long period of time. This allows testing a more varied set of solutions and engages stakeholders along the process supported by the integrated project delivery approach. As a result, time is reduced, as well as errors and, therefore, costs, which will lead to increase in efficiency and confidence among stakeholders.