The potential users of the EPB set of standards

(and what should they be aware of)

The energy assessment of buildings is carried out for various purposes, such as:

• Judging compliance with building regulations expressed in terms of limited energy use or a related quantity,
• Increasing transparency in real-estate transactions through an energy performance certification and/or display of the level of energy,
• Monitoring the energy efficiency of the building and its technical building systems,
• Helping to plan retrofit measures through predicting energy savings that would result from various actions.
• In general, the holistic approach means that the energy performance is assessed as the total energy used for heating, cooling, lighting, ventilation, domestic hot water, and, in some cases, appliances. It ensures that all technologies are treated equally and balanced.

With the EPB set of standards:

• Policy makers acquire an instrumentation that enables them to take measures in the built environment and to quantify how much these measures would reduce the energy consumed in buildings.
• Building industry, engineers and designers can improve the energy-efficiency of their designs, building products and systems. The set of standards take these current and future products, systems and designs into account. Due to the holistic approach the risk of suboptimum solutions at component level is minimized. This way industry knows in what direction to innovate.
• Building owners and occupants can benchmark against other buildings and predict the energy saving potential of improvements.