Active Building Energy Performance Contracts: an overview of policies and measures in place in Belgium, Spain, Italy and Portugal

AmBIENCe – Actively Managed Buildings with Energy Performance Contracting- is an H2020 project that aims to extend the concept of energy performance contracting for active building and making the model available and attractive to a wider range of building typologies.

The project partners conducted an assessment of enhanced Energy Performance Contracts and building demand response services in Europe, with the main goal to analyse the directives, policies and measures in place, as well as those under consideration, at EU level and across EU Member States.

Europe is on a good track towards the empowerment of the end user to foster energy transition, by putting this latter at the center of the energy system. European citizens will be the main actors in the transition from existing fossil fuel-based energy systems to an integrated, low-carbon, safe, reliable, resilient, affordable and cost-effective energy system. By 2050, demand flexibility will play a key role as product and service in energy markets, and the active role of consumers and prosumers will be fully implemented in the mechanisms of demand response (DR), through which the user is made an active participant in the management of network contingencies, as well as in reducing energy consumption through applications such as zero energy buildings or energy communities. It is found that DR and consumer empowerment are integral parts of the Energy Union and the Clean Energy Package for all Europeans because they help to reach a competitive, secure, and sustainable economy.

The report also features a detailed country analysis for Italy, Belgium, Portugal and Spain on the following three groups of key areas:

• Current status of EPC/ESCOs, through the analysis of main regulations, directives and policies on EPC, main types of EPC implemented and main actors involved in current EPC, and ESCO market.
• Current status of DR services, through the analysis of the implicit DR and main type of schemes implemented, explicit DR and demand access to the market to understand to which extent demand is allowed as a resource within the different national electricity markets, independent aggregators, regulations/policies supporting aggregation of distributed energy resources, etc.
• Current status of other factors enabling the Active Building EPC through the analysis of regulations/policies and best practices supporting demand-side flexibility at building-level, integrations of Energy and Non-Energy services in regulations/policies, and other relevant legislation and policies supporting implementation of the Active EPC.

View the full report here. 

Read the factsheet here.