Evaluation of Energy Flexibility Potential of Different Interventions Through the SRI Score: Evaluation Under the IoT Paradigm

Introduction And Background

The potential of smart technologies in the building energy sector has been a headline for the European Commission in the last decades (Directive 2002/91/EU, 2003). In line with the climate target of the Kyoto protocol (Kyoto Protocol, 1997), with the EU initiatives toward clean energy innovations (Communication 763, 2016; Communication 860, 2016) and with the expected reduction of the greenhouse gas emission by 2050 (Communication 112, 2011), the EU is doing a great effort to include the energy efficiency in buildings in its legislative framework. This effort resulted in guidelines for the building regulations, such as the Energy Efficiency Directive (Directive 2012/27/EU, 2012), the Renewable Energy Directive (Directive 2009/28/EC, 2009) and the European Performance of Building Directive (EPBD) (Directive 2010/31/EU, 2010). Currently, the energy efficiency of the European building stock is assessed by the Energy Performance Certificate (EPC). Nevertheless, a step forward was done in the third revision of the EPBD in 2018 (Directive (EU) 2018/844, 2018), since it is believed that emphasising the potential of smart technologies in the building sector will lead to an improvement in both energy efficiency and people's well-being. As a consequence, the concept of a Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI) was introduced, and it is proposed to be a common EU framework for rating the ‘smartness’ of a building. The introduction of the SRI should accelerate the transformation of the European building stock, a transformation that is more than urgent if considering that around 40% of it has been built prior the 1960s (Atanasiu et al., 2011).

The applicability of the SRI is discussed in several works, in particular with respect to the climate conditions. Janhunen et al. (2019) investigated the applicability of the SRI to Northern Europe countries undertaking a study that evaluated the assessment method for that specific region. After the study, they highlighted the need for methodological changes in the framework, also they do not consider that the SRI can be equally applicable to EU-wide energy efficiency interventions. The applicability of the SRI method for the Mediterranean climate has been evaluated by Ramezani et al. (2021), who proposed two case study buildings in Portugal. They considered that the framework worked correctly in describing the characteristics of the case study building for the Mediterranean climate conditions, but they noticed a weakness in predicting energy consumption with the proposed weighting factors, especially for non-residential buildings. Apostolopoulos et al. (2022), studied the applicability in five European countries, in residential buildings, and highlighted that low-cost retrofitting can significantly improve the SRI scores.