20th of March 2018

The internal meeting was held from March 19th to 20th in Madrid

After five months from REZBUILD’s kick off meeting in Rome, representatives of consortium partners met from March 19th to 20th in Madrid (Spain). The internal meeting main objective was to advance in the collaboration of the project and get to know the scenario of the demonstration experience in the city.

The dwelling selected for the demonstration in Spain is a semi-detached house, representing typical single familiar dwellings in different districts in the Community of Madrid. The housing buildings of this demo site are ubicated in San Fermin district and currently have energy rating E.

The objective of the renovation is to extend buildings useful life by another 40 years, to reduce consumption and energy costs of more than 60%, to improve comfort for the tenants, including the energy performance of the building as a factor of the total property value, to decrease the renovation time at least by 30% and reduce the refurbishment budget.

On March 19th, the members of consortium met at the headquarters of the Regional Ministry of Transport and Infrastructures (CTVI) in Madrid. CTVI, partner of REZBUILD consortium, is in charge of the implementation of the Spanish demonstration. One of the main tasks of this organization is the development, construction and maintenance of social housing in Madrid.

During the last day of the internal meeting, the attendees had the opportunity to visit the buildings that will be rehabilitated within the framework of the project.

In this sense, CTVI will play an active role as project partner in this pilot experience. CTVI will be in charge of the organisation of the global demonstrator, collecting information on performance, and gathering the monitored results for the related statistical analysis.

CTVI will work jointly with our partner VIAS, to whom it will provide the necessary administrative coordination; acquire the possible administrative permits, as well as the planning of the construction and the management of the project. As part of its role in the consortium, ZABALA will launch social innovation actions in order to work with the local communities in this area and establish the best practices in due diligence.

REZBUILD will develop one refurbishment ecosystem based on the integration of cost-effective technologies, business models and life cycle interaction for deep NZEB renovation. These refurbishment ecosystem and technologies will be also validated and optimized in Oslo (Norway) and Venice (Italy).

23th of January 2018

This H2020 iniciative will launch participative processes with the aim of creating a social innovation community at local level

REZBUILD Project is much more than a research and innovation project. This H2020 initiative will create a community for social innovators related to construction sector across Europe with the aim of encouraging interaction and dialogue between the main stakeholders of the sector.

In this sense, a dialogue regarding best practices will be established at European level, involving the relevant transnational organisations. This aims to be an indispensible resource providing the latest information on European social innovation (a clearinghouse featuring interviews with prominent innovators, case studies of successful ventures, the latest research, and in-depth analysis from the leading thinkers in the field).

The participative processes carried out within the framework of the project will be implemented through a methodology for decision making processes which involves all the relevant expertise in the process. All the stakeholders are involved in the Project, such as local communities, citizens, researchers, private sector, local authorities and policy makers.

The main objective is to help create a context where innovative solutions can more effectively contribute towards an innovative and collaborative refurbishement ecosystem for Europe. 

To inform about all the progress of the participatory processes and to encourage interaction and exchange of information, the Rezbuild website has a specific section dedicated to public participation and social innovation, full of new ideas that meet social needs, create social relationships and build new collaborations.

7th of November 2017

This new initiative will develop a refurbishment methodology managed by a common decision making platform that will interconnect key steps and stakeholders of the retrofitting plan.

REZBUILD project (Refurbishment decision making platform through advanced technologies for near Zero Energy Building Renovation) is a new European initiative funded by the Horizon2020 Programme of the European Commission that grows with the main aim of defining an innovative and collaborative refurbishment ecosystem for transforming RE assets into Near Zero Energy Building (NZEB).

The construction market has entered a phase of recovery after the global financial crisis and it is time to face new challengues: encouraging a high-technologized sector, which turns Energy Efficiency into a sustainable business. This is one of the strategies that the European Union follows to improve their energy efficiency, boosting their competitiveness and facing social challenges.

The construction sector is the highest energy consumer (about 40 %) and main contributor to GHG emissions (about 36 %) in Europe. At this stage, tackling refurbishment of existing residential buildings (historic buildings included) is a top priority and decarbonisation is the main goal aligned with the European energy and climate change policies.

In this context a number of challenges have been set for NZEB renovation taking into account all stakeholders involved through five pillars: technical, economical, social, environmental and legal. Nowadays, NZEB renovation methodologies are required as one of the key enablers supported by Horizon 2020 Framework Programme in order to promote business research and innovation through energy-efficient buildings.

REZBUILD will address these challenges by opening the construction sector with the integration of innovation technologies to pave the way towards an annual renovation rate of 2,5% instead of current rates lower than 1%.

In order to achieve these goals REZBUILD will base its refurbishment ecosystem with the integration of cost-effective technologies, business models and life cycle interaction to diverse residential renovation typologies and interconnecting both, building renovation stages and stakeholders.

This innovation will establish a multi-collaborative framework within a refurbishment methodology managed by an Agile Project Management tool based on cloud service, capable to interconnect in real-time the key steps of a tailored retrofitting plan among all stakeholders involved within the building renovation value chain.

Moreover, decision making tools will be performed in oder to validate the best optimized costeffective refurbishment technology package in 3 different European scenarios (Spain, Norway and Italy), each one with a different representative climate and tipology of building.

This all-in- one decision making platform will communicate all stakeholders involved in the housing renovation process from designers, refurbishment to private consumer and public / private owners. Key stakeholders groups and local communities will be involved in the project through social innovation actions.

REZBUILD consortium brings together 13 partners from 5 different countries. The consortium is formed by the equilibrated collaboration of international level entities represented by big industries, SMEs, consultancy firms, RTD centres, public bodies, users associations and academic institutions: Officinae Verdi Group (Italy), Vias y Construcciones (Spain), CARTIF (Spain), ESTIA (France), Comunidad de Madrid (Spain), Saint-Gobain Placo Iberica (Spain), ONYX Solar (Spain), SINTEF (Norway), OBOS (Norway), University of Nottingham (United Kingdom), Exploded View (Spain), Rimond (Italy), and ZABALA Innovation Consulting (Spain).

This project is awarded by the European Commission with a Horizon2020 programme grant of 6,996,128.25 € and a total budget of 9,038,208.75 €. REZBUILD’s kick off meeting took place recently in Rome and the project will run for 4 years.