Work package T1: Developing carbon footprint and energy efficiency toolkit

The basis for any  energy renovation of a public building is energy audit. It allows to estimate the potential savings and costs associated to renovation activities and to prioritize investments, choosing the most favorable ones.  But it is anyway a quite costly and time consuming process and often it is not possible for small Municipalities to extensively audit the entire building stock.

FEEDSCHOOLS wants to develop a set of different and interconnected web applications to ease the auditing process and the renovation of schools to very high efficient buildings which use almost zero energy:

• Energy and Resource Efficiency Application for calculating energy savings and reductions of carbon dioxide emissions resulting from implementation of various energy efficiency and renewable energy measures.
• A catalogue on novel energy efficiency technologies and good practices which include innovative techniques, materials, components and systems, for retrofitting existing school buildings and converting them to nearly zero energy buildings.
• Financial Application which will allow to choose among the existing incentives and funding possibilities to allow public bodies to afford costs of schools renovation.

This set of tools will simplify energy audit process allowing for significant economic and time savings while choosing the most advantageous renovation plan based on best available technologies and practices, along with selection of suitable mechanism for financing the investment.

The web applications will be tested and validated in pilot activities in the partners countries. Eight schools will be selected in six partner regions to test the tool taking into account different climatic data, typical construction characteristics and energy performances and environmental characteristics (materials, carbon dioxide emission factors) of the school buildings in each region. FEEDSCHOOLS toolkit structure and functionality will be designed taking into account needs of its final users, that will be identified by institutional partners. 

The toolkit could be used by energy and financial managers in municipalities and technical staff involved in the process of school buildings renovation. It can also become a useful tool for students and academics from the related research fields. 

The user-friendly FEEDSCHOOLS toolkit, translated into national languages, will be based for free use on ENEA website. Project Leader guarantees its maintenance beyond the project duration.