The availability of energy at affordable prices is among the key factors for achieving sustainable development of the society. However, the production of energy and its use has a negative effect on the environment, resulting in local and regional pollution and leading to global warming and climate change. The entire world faces the challenge of a development that provides security of energy supply while reducing the negative impacts on the environment.

As buildings consume a large amount of energy, they have the highest potential for energy and cost savings.This is why recently, energy efficiency in the residential sector, both for individual houses and multi-apartment buildings, gained significant interest for the public sector, tenants, utility companies and investors.
There are different potential interventions to increase energy efficiency in residential buindings. When these interventions are applied to individual houses, these are strongly dependent on many factors that vary significantlly (such as building size and shape, envelope material, construction technique, etc.) that thus makes a general classification of measures and their analysis relatively harder. However, for multi-apartment buildings there are various typologies of interventions that can be applied, making analysis of energy efficiency measures generally easier.

This report by the H2020 ComAct project, available in Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Lithuanian and Hungarian gives an overview of the different types of interventians applicable to multi-family buildings, with related payback times.

In addition to cost and energy savings, improving energy efficiency in buidings can lead to many more benefits. It can for example increase energy security, reduce air pollution and climate change emissions, expand employment in unskilled and skilled labor, improve economic competitiveness and many others.

Find the reports here.