DEEP ENERGY RETROFITTING OF BUILDING: THE DECISION-MAKING AND VALUATION PROCESS THROUGH PASSIVE HOUSE STANDARD

Every year just a small part of the Italian building stock hurts a significant energy regeneration, which occur mainly on occasion of programmed wider restructuring of the building. Therefore, the dynamics of the construction sector are still too slow compared to the ‘20-20-20 commitments’ (The Directive 2012/27/EU Energy Efficiency entered into force December 4, 2012) and they are not enough focused on new consistent buildings and planned renovations. It should therefore promote and facilitate the process of upgrading the energy efficiency of existing real estate assets by increasing the actions with regard to the stages of physiological renewal of the construction. For work on the building, the buildings in urban areas are more commonly condominium, with the consequent difficulty in reaching agreement between cohabitants of the same building. There is also probably a different perception of the home value, as in the city value component related to the position is higher than the other components, such as state of repair, aesthetic quality, facilities. Adopters’ potential evaluation of green alternatives focus usually on perceptions of the alternatives attributes. As homeowners give high priority to initial investment cost, push more on incentive policies is necessary. There is still a general perception in the real estate sector that green building is significantly more expensive than traditional methods of development. Wider dissemination of studies and debates in this direction would lead to greater awareness of the decision to renew only partially rather than completely the building organism by the owners. The new incentive mechanism of deep energy retrofitting of condominium buildings in Italy is the focus of the discussion to define the real applicability and affordability, highlighting the positive and negative elements of the Passivhaus (PH) standard in the north Italian context. By forcing the intervention to match the requirements of the PH standard, the study seeks to establish whether this standard can be a guideline for existing building retrofitting interventions, considering that the standard has already been applied in warm weather conditions typical of the countries of southern Europe.