Potential and limits to improve energy efficiency in space heating inexisting school buildings in northern Italy

Improving the energy performance of public buildings is important for the promotion of a culture ofenergy efficiency among the local population. Indeed the European Union has developed strategiesparticularly for this sector using specific legislation and has targeted projects for economic support.In this paper we present a energy audit campaign conducted on 49 school building complexes locatedin the Lombardy region of Italy to collect data concerning their actual energy consumption for spaceheating, occupant behaviour and the technical characteristics of the buildings. On the basis of thesedata, different energy retrofit scenarios were studied with different performance and cost-effectivenesstargets. The results show that it is not always convenient to improve excessively energy performance forheating.