Analysis of 85 green buildings within the Project GreenBuildingplus: a basis for supporting energy efficient investments

In many countries the availability of data about the energy performance of low-energy buildings is quite limited and this lack of information refrains potential investments on green buildings. In 2004, in order to contribute to generate and collect reliable performance data, the European Commission launched the GreenBuilding (GB) Programme aimed at enhancing energy efficiency in both existing and new non-residential buildings on a voluntary basis. Under the umbrella of the GB Programme, the GreenBuildingPlus (GB+) Project operated from 2007 to 2010. One of the activities developed in the project was the creation of a European database on building energy performance. The authors developed a Data Collection Tool, which was used by building owners and their consultants to provide a detailed description of the candidate buildings and their energy efficiency and renewable energy features. In this paper, we present a selection of the results of a statistical analysis of the detailed data of 85 green buildings. The main outputs of the GB+ project are: the total primary energy saved by the 85 buildings amounted to about 115 000 MWh per year and the average percentage of savings is 54%, hence much higher than 25% requested by the GB Programme.