HAPPEN

Project

HAPPEN is funded by the European Commission within the HORIZON 2020 Framework Programme - TOPIC “Overcoming market barriers and promoting deep renovation of buildings” (Call identifier: EE-11-2017), in the fields of Coordination and Support Action funding scheme.

The project pursues the development and activation of a holistic, transparent and adaptive approach to deep and beyond (towards nZEB) retrofitting, specifically tailored for the Med space and named MedZEB.

This approach is mainly addressed to the residential sector (private and public) and includes the development of an ICT platform intended as the main market vector for overcoming the barriers that hamper the increase of renovation rate in the EU.

Goals

The main goals are the following:

Empower the key actors of the retrofitting value chain, in order to enable the market uptake of deep retrofitting interventions, through dedicated actions of awareness, engagement, behavioral upgrade and capacity building;

Standardize the interventions and their related quality control measures, in order to trigger feasibility, replicability and comparability of the interventions, thus creating advantages in terms of scale economy, and reaching the highest added value for the end users;

Create an assisted digital marketplace for the deep and beyond retrofitting (D&BR) of buildings, where demand and offer shall meet in a transparent, holistic and adaptive framework; this objective will be reached by developing the HAPPEN platform purposed to become the reference portal at EU level for the D&BR market in the Med space;

Test and validate the project outputs by carrying out Pilot Actions (PAs) in all country partners, with the aim to foster the large scale exploitation of the project results across the Med space;

Suggest new regulatory approaches, in order to stimulate high political level discussions on the necessity of creating purpose frameworks for the Med areas.

Role
of Certimac

Certimac conceived and wrote the proposal and is the Leader of the “MED-ZEB Task Force” as a strategic and cross-cutting instrument into the sake of the Project to improve the applicability and the exploitation of the actions proposed toward a sustainable renovation strategy into MED areas.

Certimac has conceived and developed the “MED-ZEB approach” concept in a preliminary way according to its consolidated background in Energy Efficiency and in Energy Management of Buildings, in order to widespread and encourage the underestimated potential of the MED existing building stock. The main innovation is based on a new holistic approach on retrofit integrating technological, climate, cultural and behavior effects toward deep and beyond renovation.

In its role of “MED-ZEB Task Force” Leader, Certimac will be involved in different Work Packages, actively contributing in the identification of integrated renovation measures, in the definition of the HAPPEN Programme regarding the Finance and Regulation aspects and in the coordination of the technical board for the development of the Pilot Actions.

Expected results

The development of the retrofitting market is facing difficulties throughout Europe, but these difficulties assume in the Med space specific characteristics, due to environmental and climatic factors, to the structure of the ownership and of the built stock, to peculiar social and economic conditions. For this reason, the project aims to set up a strategy that goes beyond the mere physical needs of the buildings and the technological aspects, for integrating social, financial, technical and environmental aspects, in order to:

reconnect the fragmented value chain in the retrofitting market;

rebuild a framework of trust around the deep and beyond retrofitting market;

increase the overall convenience and appeal of the retrofitting interventions.