Valuing the Cost of Delayed Energy Actions

Most of the building stock in Europe and, in particular, in Lombardy, North of Italy, were built without sufficient attention to energy efficiency. It must be restructured to spare energy, fuel costs, and emissions of traditional pollutants and GHGs. The paper defines an optimization problem that determines the most cost-effective interventions and where they should be actuated, considering different scenarios of evolution of economy and technology. The results are compared with real data, showing that the current pattern of adoption of energy-saving measures is definitely slower than desirable. The economic loss due to such a delayed adoption may reach billions of euros.