Launch of the report Tracking the market maturity for nZEB

European legislation (Energy Performance of Buildings Directive) makes nZEBs a standard by 2020. The technology is already available and proven; however, the large-scale uptake of nZEB construction and renovation will be a big challenge for all market actors and stakeholders involved. A substantial gap in reliable data on current market activities makes it difficult for policy-makers to evaluate the success of their policies and measures.

Therefore, the objective of this report is to develop appropriate criteria for monitoring and measuring the market maturity towards nearly Zero-Energy Buildings in the EU countries. As the intention is to do this monitoring and measuring for several periods and not just once in order to see the speed of development, this is called “tracking” the market maturity. This goes far beyond just counting the number of nearly Zero-Energy Buildings in the Member States, which is already done in the national plans for increasing the number of nearly Zero-Energy Buildings according to EPBD Article 9. Rather it assess the necessary market conditions for increasing the number of nZEB.

The authors adopt two approaches:

1) They analyse the general theory around market maturity, which is closely related to product life cycle theory and afterwards,

2) They specify the general theory to the nZEB context elaborating a list of possible criteria, describing possible data sources to develop the criteria further and suggest measures for quantification. 

It turned out that it is important to monitor the way of managing the market or product and the development in an early stage. In this context especially nine general criteria and indicators (questions) can be used to evaluate the current management. To read more about the findings of this report visit this page.

This report was developed within the IEE project, ZEBRA2020. To find out more about the project aims and outcomes visit its website at: www.zebra2020.eu