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As a part of BIM4REN (Building Information Modelling based tools & technologies for fast and efficient RENovation of residential buildings) H2020 project, the analysis of the barriers to the use of BIM tools in renovation processes, as well as the necessary requirements to ensure a successful digital workflow is presented. This paper focuses on the Italian market where surveys, interviews and a workshop are carried out. The full study provides information by type of stakeholder, type of renovation work and the phase of the process, to instruct the development of the BIM platform in subsequent steps of BIM4REN project.

GEOFIT, “Deployment of novel GEOthermal systems, technologies and tools for energy efficient building retrofitting,” is a recently launched 4-year H2020 project funded by the Innovation and Networks Executive Agency (INEA) under the call topic LCE-17-2017: Easier to install and more efficient geothermal systems for retrofitting buildings. GEOFIT is a part of INEA’s Energy Portfolio Low Carbon Economy (LCE), Renewable Energy Technologies (RET) and brings together 24 partners from 10 European countries to work on the development of novel and smart shallow geothermal systems. This paper introduces the project.

This report summarises the conduct and key findings from the fourth and final scientific workshop organised under the Mas²tering project (Multi-Agent Systems and Secured coupling of Telecom and Energy gRIds for Next Generation smart grid services), which is co-funded by the European Union under the FP7 programme. The workshop was co-located with Sustainable Places 2017 hosted by Teesside University in Middlesbrough, UK. Sustainable Places is an annual international conference focused on innovations for Energy-efficient Buildings and the wider smart grids that connect them. This fourth edition of the Mas2tering workshop series aimed at validating the project’s work to date with respect to its approach, technologies, use cases and in-progress results. For this purpose, a panel of three experts was formed and to them the project presented an Overview & Approach, Physical Testing at the ENGIE Crigen facilities, simulation of the Cardiff Grid, Project Use Cases and the Business Model Approach. Thematic issues and conclusions from the presentations and discussions are provided herein.

Residential flexibility (a.k.a demand response) is a key component of smart grids to reduce our carbon footprint, to have reliable power (balance between power and demand, and avoiding congestion) and more affordable electricity tariffs. However, to have a significant participation in the flexibility markets, households needs good price signals. Today, the electricity bill components (volumetric and capacity for both consumption and generation) are evolving and grid services are increasingly more available to households. This is due to the evolution in the energy mix, deployment of new technologies (smart meter roll-out, gradual uptake of electric vehicles, heat pumps and batteries), regional integration (interconnectors and integration of balancing markets) and evolution of society (sharing economy or Peer2peer and ubiquity of smartphones). These trends will have a quantitative impact on the different energy bills in the short term (2020) and longer term. Further investigation is also suggested to go from the qualitative analysis to a better quantitative analysis.