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At today's renovation rate of around 1% of buildings per year, a timely transition of the EU building sector towards climate-neutral levels by 2050 cannot be ensured. To accelerate energy efficiency investments in this area, the European Commission has intensified its efforts in recent years, with specific calls to strengthen the existing financial framework, increase funding levels, diversify types of financial models and explore new supporting mechanisms. Various private and public financial and fiscal mechanisms for energy renovations in buildings are currently available in Europe in the form of non-repayable rewards, debt financing, equity financing, etc. This report provides a country-by-country overview of the most important public schemes identified across the EU, and investigates new private financial products in place to stimulate more energy efficiency investments in residential, commercial and public buildings. Good practices are identified based on the criteria of impact, cost effectiveness, ambition level of energy efficiency upgrade, funding sustainability/continuity, scalability and outreach to hard-to-reach groups., JRC.C.2-Energy Efficiency and Renewables

Several contrasting effects are reported in the existing literature concerning the impact assessment of the COVID19 outbreak on the use of energy in buildings. Following an in-depth literature review, we here propose a GISbased approach, based on pre-pandemic, partial, and full lockdown scenarios, using a bottom-up engineering model to quantify these impacts. The model has been verified against measured energy data from a total number of 451 buildings in three urban neighborhoods in the Canton of Geneva, Switzerland. The accuracy of the engineering model in predicting the energy demand has been improved by 10%, in terms of the mean absolute percentage error, as a result of adopting a data-driven correction with a random forest algorithm. The obtained results show that the energy demand for space heating and cooling tended to increase by 8% and 17%, respectively, during the partial lockdown, while these numbers rose to 13% and 28% in the case of the full lockdown. The study also reveals that the introduced detailed occupancy scenarios are the key to improving the accuracy of urban building energy models (UBEMs). Finally, it is shown that the proposed GIS-based approach can be used to mitigate the expected impacts of any possible future pandemic in urban neighborhoods.