Leading experts in the field of building construction in Europe gathered in Sofia to take part in the international seminar "Skills and knowledge for intelligent and highly efficient buildings". The event was organized by the Center for Energy Efficiency EnEffect and their partners in the international projects OutPHit, nZEB Ready, SMART2 and DiVIRTUE.
"We have the rare opportunity to host four European projects that are targeted and that spread knowledge about quality, efficient and user-friendly buildings", said Dragomir Tsanev, executive director of EnEfect, at the opening.
The four projects, which Tsanev defined as a collective picture of the future for the market of energy-efficient buildings, were presented in more detail by their coordinators in the person of Jan Steiger from the German Passivhaus Institut (OutPHit project), Paris Fokaides from Euphyia (Cyprus, SMART2 project), Horia Petran from PRO-NZEB (Romania, nZEB project) and Dragomir Tsanev EnEffect (DiVIRTUE project).
"Each of these projects addresses the question of how to use our existing knowledge of building performance and physics to benefit the market," Tsanev said.
Smart buildings and smart cities – a leading trend
"We want to apply energy efficiency standards to speeding up renovation, in whatever form it takes - whether it's pre-fabrication or in the conventional sense of the word, in a rational way." But the main thing for us is that the process leads to energy efficiency in a reliable way," Jan Steiger explained the goal of the OutPHit project.
For Paris Fokaides, smart buildings and smart cities are a leading trend today.
"Within the framework of the project, we have developed and provided a toolkit with which to evaluate the degree of intelligence of buildings," said Fokaides, coordinator of the SMART2 project, in which EnEffect is a partner organization for Bulgaria.
SMART2 is one of the initiatives supported by the EU Life program aimed at developing and improving the "smart readiness indicators" of buildings.
The nZEB concept – zero energy buildings as the future standard
At the presentation of the third pan-European nZEB project, Dragomir Tsanev pointed out that the moment has come when the knowledge gained so far should be applied to the development of a systematic, targeted certification scheme guaranteeing the quality of building construction.
The abbreviation nZEB from word combinations in the English language, as for the USA the concept of net-zero energy emission building is applicable, while for the EU the concept of nearly zero energy buildings is adopted.
"We now know that the nZEB concept is also applicable to the renovation process. Renovation to nZEB-level is the new understanding of deep reconstruction," said project coordinator Horia Petran, for which Bulgaria is also a pilot country.
A leading goal of the initiative is to improve market readiness for near-zero energy buildings as the future standard. The project aims to overcome the lack of information, to pay attention to the need for qualified personnel in the field of zero-energy buildings and, last but not least, to the need for supporting tools. These, according to the project concept, are the necessary conditions for market preparation.
The staffing problem
The latest project - DiVIRTUE, which started at the beginning of this month, was presented by the host of the international event, Dragomir Tsanev.
"The construction industry needs people, and if he's honest with himself, he should know he's not going to find them. For Bulgaria, we calculated that just to cover the minimum renovation volumes under the renovation programs, 250 people are needed. Otherwise, we will hardly achieve what we set out to do with the current approaches and technologies in construction. The situation is the same in the Czech Republic, Croatia, Romania. However, the problem is not solved by attracting people from Pakistan, Vietnam and other parts of the world, because trained people are needed. They don't come with the skills we need. So we need to take action and do more and better with fewer people. And the solution lies in the technologies, in training the personnel how to handle them," Tsanev explained.
With the presented project, an answer is sought to the question of how the construction sector can be attractive to young people, and especially to those who graduate from specialized construction educational institutions. The task of the initiative is to develop training schemes using virtual reality for the purposes of zero-emission and energy-efficient new and existing buildings.