A data-driven framework for building energy benchmarking and renovation decision-making support in Sweden

In Europe, the buildings sector is responsible for 40% of energy use and more than 30% of buildings are older than 50 years. Due to ageing, a large number of houses require energy-efficient renovation to meet building energy performance standards and the national energy efficiency target. Although Swedish house owners are willing to improve energy efficiency, there is a need for a dedicated platform providing decision-making knowledge for house owners to benchmark their buildings. This paper proposes a data-driven framework for building energy renovation benchmarking as part of an energy advisory service development for the Västerbotten region, Sweden. This benchmark model facilitates regional homeowners to benchmark their building energy performance relative to the national target and similar neighbourhood buildings. Specifically, based on user input data such as energy use, location, construction year, floor area, etc., this model benchmarks the user’s building performance using two benchmark references i.e., 1) Sweden’s target to reduce buildings by 50% energy use intensity (EUI) by 50% by 2050 compared to the average EUI in 1995, 2) comparing user building with the most relevant peer group of buildings, using energy performance certificates (EPC) big data. Several building groups will be classified based on influential factors that affect building energy use. Hence, this benchmark provides decision-making supportive knowledge to homeowners e.g., whether they need to perform an energy-efficient renovation. In the future, this methodology will be extended and implemented in the digital platform to provide helpful insights to decide on suitable EEMs. This work is an integral part of project AURORAL aims to deliver an interoperable, open, and integrated digital platform, demonstrated by cross-domain applications through large-scale pilots in 8 regions in Europe, including Västerbotten.