Damir Mandic, Head of Business Development at REA North, presented the study on the current state of energy renovation of public sector buildings in Croatia during the final conference of the nZEB Ready project, specifically during the joint workshop of the OutPHit, nZEB Ready, SMART2, and DiVIRTUE projects, titled “Skills and Knowledge for High Performance Buildings,” held on August 22, 2024, in Sofia (Bulgaria).
The study was prepared as part of the OUR-CEE (Overcoming Underperforming Renovations in Central and Eastern Europe) project.
The studie provide insights into the magnitude of the problem of underperforming renovations in project country, present the possible reasons that might be behind underperforming energy renovations, and offer a series of policy recommendations to improve the performance and impact of future public building for each country.
Despite this first renovation wave on public buildings in Croatia, by 2020 less than 10 % of public buildings had been renovated. Due to low ambition, already-renovated public buildings fall short of expected energy savings and they are dismissed from further action because they are labeled as “already renovated”. The reasons behind this underperformance are unknown, and public sector employees lack a general understanding of building life-cycle costs, leading to the abandonment of renovation projects with higher initial investment costs.
A similar study was conducted by other partners in the OUR-CEE project, and these studies are available at the following link.
The partners in the OUR-CEE project include Energy Policy Group (Romania), Center For Energy Efficiency EnEffect (Bulgaria), Polish Network Energie Cités (Poland), and Regional Energy Agency North (Croatia). OUR-CEE is a project supported by the European Climate Initiative (EUKI), which addresses the challenge of overcoming energy renovations of public sector buildings that do not realize their full savings potential, focusing on four Central and Eastern European countries. The project’s results will support the acceleration of deep renovations in Central and Eastern Europe and help achieve EU energy efficiency goals.
