European Digital Building Logbook: definition of its functionalities to maximize its potential

• Marta Gómez-Gil ^[1] ; Belinda López-Mesa ^[1] ; Almudena Espinosa-Fernández ^[1]
  1. [1] Universidad de Zaragoza

     Universidad de Zaragoza

     Zaragoza, España

     
• Localización: EESAP13 International Conference 2022, 5-6 October Donostia-San Sebastián: Akten liburua = Libro de actas = Proceedings book / Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de San Sebastián (dir. congr.), 2022, ISBN 978-84-1319-499-8, págs. 63-71
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro
• Resumen

  • The building sector has a crucial role to achieve the climate goals set by the European Union for 2050. In this sense, renovating the existing building stock is a high-impact option to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the EU. However, to achieve the goals set by EPBD (EU) 2018/844, the renovation rate needs to move from the current value of 0.4–1.2% to 3%. One of the barriers that prevent renovation rate growth is the lack of open data about the building stock, which makes it difficult to analyse the real state of buildings. This barrier has hardly been addressed in the literature, but a new tool recently identified in the Renovation Wave, is called to solve this problem: the Digital Building Logbook (DBL). It is understood as a digital repository of all the relevant data on a building, collected throughout its lifecycle, to facilitate transparency, trust, informed decision making and information sharing among building owners and occupants, financial institutions and public authorities. Although the concept of a building logbook is not new in Europe (some initiatives have already been running at national and regional scale, such as the Woningpas in Flanders, the Hausakte in Germany or the Libro del Edificio in Spain), a common European Digital Building Logbook model does not exist so far. As the implementation of the DBL is a European priority, several groups have recently proposed DBL models, named the iBRoad-Log, the ALDREN BuildLog, the X-tendo Logbook and the Study on the Development of a European Union Framework for Buildings’ Digital Logbook. Even though these proposals are an important contribution to the subject, there is no consensus regarding crucial aspects, such as its functionalities, the indicators or data fields that the DBL should contain or the way to collect them. Additionally, the potential of the DBL has not been fully addressed nor the operation and use stage has been solved. In this paper, the full potential of the DBL will be explored, starting from a critical analysis of the existing European DBL models, and going beyond by proposing and exploring new functionalities, such as the possibility to gather data that can be used to collect progress indicators to monitor the decarbonization in the building sector (as the ones proposed in Commission Recommendation (EU) 2019/786), or features, such as the connection to existing platforms e.g. the Energy Performance Certificates (EPC), and the upcoming data from other European initiatives related to the buildings sector, such as ‘Renovation passports’, lifecycle emissions calculation using the Level(s) framework, the Smart Readiness Indicator or the sustainable product passports for construction materials.