Energy retrofit of historic and existing buildings. The legislative and regulatory point of view

The building sector is one of the key consumers of energy in Europe and consequently energy savings in existing building is an important issue. For that reason, European Union has enacted several Directives dealing, directly and indirectly, with energy efficiency in building aiming to reduce the buildings energy use. Those directives, while dealing with existing buildings, do not take care of the Architectural Heritage in a specific uniform way adopting the derogation regime: exceptions are available at the national level to exclude from their application buildings listed in the Architectural Heritage as historic buildings. That means that any country can adopt its own rules to include or exclude buildings from respecting the energy efficiency requirements for existing buildings. Consequently, up to now no general rules, no codes and no standards are available for energy retrofit of historical and architectural valuable buildings. On the other side, no international act, in the field Architectural Heritage conservation, deals with energy and energy retrofit. Furthermore, the European Union Treaty does not comprise the Cultural Heritage as matter of European legislation. Thus to cover this gap between histor-ic/historical building and energy retrofit a lobbying action is needed, managed by the national Cultural Heritage authorities, which can steers EU policy in a more effective way towards energy retrofit of historic/historical buildings.