To assess the overall energy performance of a building, the European Commission has established a set of standards and accompanying technical reports to support the EPBD (mandate M/480 to the European Committee for Standardisation, CEN 2012-2017). These standards are called the energy performance of buildings standards or “set of EPB standards”.
All of these standards have been developed by CEN (Europe).
And several of them, including the core set mentioned in the European Directive (EPBD:2018, Annex 1), have been developed in collaboration with ISO (global).
Consequently, these EN ISO standards are applicable at worldwide level.
Others are at this moment only available in Europe (EN standards).

Do you want to know more about the composition of the set of EPB standards?
- You can go directly to the page on Modular structure
- Or watch the short (6 min.) video mapping the set of EPB standards

 

The set of standards and accompanying technical reports on the energy performance of buildings (set of EPB standards) have been prepared under a mandate given to CEN by the European Commission and the European Free Trade Association ( Mandate M/480, 2010 ), to support the EPBD.

The EPBD, the European Directive on the energy performance of buildings aims to promote the improvement of the energy performance of buildings within the European Union, taking into account outdoor climatic and local conditions, as well as indoor climate requirements and cost-effectiveness (Article 1).

The mandate M/480 was issued as the recast of the EPBD raised the need to revisit already existing standards and reformulate and add standards so that they become on the one hand unambiguous and compatible, and on the other hand a clear and explicit overview of the choices, boundary conditions and input data that need to be defined at national or regional level.

Such national or regional choices remain necessary, due to differences in climate, culture & building tradition, policy and legal frameworks. (Read more...)

The Mandate M/480 was a follow up on the Mandate M/343 which had led to a first generation of EPB standards (2004-2008), in support of the first version of the EPBD (2003).

M/480 was inspired by the Recommendations from the EU CENSE project (2004-2008) .

The development of the set of EPB standards was not restricted to Europe. For instance the main EPB standard, the EPB overarching standard EN ISO 52000-1, and the subset of EPB standards on building energy needs and building elements is done at global level, in a cooperation between CEN (Europe) and ISO (worldwide).

In general, the set of EPB standards were developed in five CEN Technical Committees (Europe), in two ISO Technical Committees (worldwide), each covering a specific expertise. The mandate M/480 project (2011-2016) enabled the required effective central coordination via the CTL (expert group of CEN core Team Leaders) of CEN/TC371 to obtain and secure consistency of the overall approach and of the technical details.

See the Documents page for an overview of all EPB standards and technical reports. Or see EPB standards and technical reports per topic (select topic in the footer of this page).