Energy efficiency in buildings: What drives the investments? The caseof Lombardy Region

tIn recent years, following an agreement with the Italian Ministry of the Environment, Lombardy Regionhas promoted numerous initiatives for energy efficiency and use of renewable energy sources. Theseinitiatives covered a large spectrum of technologies and practices. Energy efficiency in buildings has afundamental role in the regional energy balance and pollutants emissions, including CO2eq. Local energyefficiency programs aimed at supporting these interventions have to be designed, managed and mon-itored to clearly identify the real energy, economic and environmental benefits derived by them. Inthis paper, the monitoring and analysis process performed within the topic of energy efficiency in thebuilding sector is presented, referring to the program named Design and realization of interventions forenergy retrofit in public buildings and realization of zero emissions buildings (i.e. buildings that have zeroemissions of greenhouse gases related to their operation). In recent years, several research studies werecarried out in the same field related to achieving cost-optimality. For this reason, the presented eco-nomic analysis was enhanced also taking into account the cost optimality methodology and the nearlyzero energy building standards. The main results of the research are described in the present paper byenergy, environmental and economic point of view.