Synthesis Report on the assessment of Member States' building renovation strategies

The European building stock consumes approximately 40% of primary energy and it is responsible for 36% of the EU greenhouse emissions. A significant reduction of building energy demand is a requisite to meet Europe’s GHG emissions reduction targets. The Article 4 of the Energy Efficiency Directive requires Member States "to establish a long-term strategy beyond 2020 for mobilising investment in the renovation of residential and commercial buildings with a view to improving the energy performance of the building stock. In order to transpose the Directive and to increase the rates and depth of building renovation, the Member States were asked to develop their first renovation strategies and provide them with their third NEEAPs, due by 30th April 2014. The JRC undertook an assessment of 31 national/regional building renovation strategies submitted by the Member States. The present report summarises the assessment performed by JRC on the received strategies. The analysis assessed and evaluated the compliance with all the items of Article 4 and checked if they were adequately addressed in each national renovation strategy.JRC.F.7-Renewables and Energy Efficienc

La ricerca in collaborazione con l'industria dei docenti universitari: aggiornamenti sugli esiti di un questionario

Questo articolo aggiorna i risultati di un questionario che è stato oggetto di trattazione dell’articolo “Ricerca industriale di scienziati accademici: una opportunità o un rischio per la open science? Evidenza empirica, considerazioni teoriche ed esiti di un questionario in tre università italiane”, Working paper n.20/2005 del Dipartimento di Economia Istituzioni Territorio dell’Università di Ferrara.. Ai precedenti 80 questionari svolti in tre università si aggiungono i risultati di altri 88 questionari, con le stesse domande più alcune nuove, svolti in altre cinque università

La ricerca in collaborazione con l'industria dei docenti universitari: aggiornamento sugli esiti di un questionario

Questo articolo aggiorna i risultati di un questionario che è stato oggetto di trattazione dell’articolo “Ricerca industriale di scienziati accademici: una opportunità o un rischio per la open science? Evidenza empirica, considerazioni teoriche ed esiti di un questionario in tre università italiane”, Working paper n.20/2005 del Dipartimento di Economia Istituzioni Territorio dell’Università di Ferrara.. Ai precedenti 80 questionari svolti in tre università si aggiungono i risultati di altri 88 questionari, con le stesse domande più alcune nuove, svolti in altre cinque università

Relazioni tra imprese e università nel biotech-salute dell'Emilia Romagna. Una valutazione sulla base della co-authorship delle pubblicazioni scientifiche

Questo lavoro analizza il tema delle collaborazioni tra istituti di ricerca e imprese e le loro evoluzioni recenti, evidenziando il ruolo che può avere in un tale tipo di analisi un indicatore relativamente poco utilizzato, almeno in Italia: le pubblicazioni a firma congiunta. Il campo di osservazione sono le imprese dell’Emilia Romagna che lavorano nel settore della salute utilizzando le biotecnologie. L’analisi riguarda l’impatto che le dimensioni d’impresa hanno sulle collaborazioni con università, ospedali ed altre imprese; l’ambito territoriale delle collaborazioni; la struttura delle reti di collaborazione; le relazioni tra questi fattori e la qualità delle pubblicazioni stesse. Da queste osservazioni empiriche si cerca quindi di trarre delle implicazioni in termini di lineamenti di policy a livello locale

Untapping multiple benefits: hidden values in environmental and building policies

The untapped / hidden benefits of environmental policies are huge, this piece of research showcases and places a monetary value on the added benefits to our health, society and the economy that environmental investments and policy linked to energy efficiency can bring. Findings show that green policies can improve both our health and the economy and can go hand-in-hand. This study provides guidance to policy and decision-makers in developing a methodology for the inclusion of multiple benefits in a cost/benefit assessment of energy efficiency policy. It is envisaged that providing a macroeconomic understanding of the wider benefits of energy efficiency in buildings will encourage policy-makers and investors to develop and quantify the benefits of more effective energy efficiency policies and programmes and drive higher levels of renovation, thus supporting the EU's Renovation Wave. This Report provides the European Commission (EC), the national administrations in charge of implementing EU energy efficiency policies (such as the EPBD) in Member States (MS) and other decision makers seeking to include multiple benefits in their policies, building programmes and financial programmes with: • Information on identified benefits; • A methodology for an enhanced consideration of wider benefits, in particular in the calculation of cost-optimal minimum energy performance requirements under the EPBD; and • A toolkit to calculate and quantify / measure the monetary value of these impacts, from a policy and investor standpoint.JRC.C.2-Energy Efficiency and Renewable

From nearly-zero energy buildings to net-zero energy districts

The implementation of the EU 2020 energy and climate targets triggered the transformation of Europe’s neighbourhoods to net-zero energy districts (NZED). The Report review and analyses the cases of frontrunner municipalities In Europe. They set ambitious targets to reduce their energy demand and to increase the share of their energy supply from local renewable energy sources. These targets are set in different ways and the timeline to meet the agreed target at a local level varies from one municipality to another. Hvar, a remote Croatian Island, as well as the municipality of Val-de-Ruz, in Switzerland, have set a target to be self-sufficient. However, the former aims at meeting its self-sufficiency target to be 20% by 2020 while the latter aims to be totally self-sufficient by 2030. Similarly, the municipality of Helsingor in Denmark aims for carbon neutrality by 2050 while Cloughjordan in Ireland aimed at building an eco-village in a rural area. Other municipalities such as Salzburg in Austria developed a 2050 smart city roadmap while Valby in Denmark set a renewable energy target and the municipality of Zaragoza in Spain developed and implemented a holistic bioclimatic design at neighbourhood level. Other important features of the seven districts analysed in this report are the emergence of new actors and the innovative governance structures set by municipalities to ensure all necessary actors are involved, and the use of modern technologies (such as smart meters, smart communication tools, social media platform, 3D-Scanning and Building Information Models – BIM). In all the cases analysed, public finance (EU and national) has been instrumental in unleashing the transition to net-zero energy districts.JRC.C.2-Energy Efficiency and Renewable

Enabling Positive Energy Districts across Europe: energy efficiency couples renewable energy

This report aims to understand how to handle energy performance targets by moving beyond individual buildings towards a district level. This is a relatively new endeavour in both scientific research and realised projects. One route towards this could be to have the minimum energy performance requirements imposed by the EPBD also be applied to a cluster of buildings in a specific district. In practice, this means setting legal requirements that enable communities to become zero or positive energy districts (municipal or regional requirements). From a financial point of view, a zero-energy district (ZED) or positive energy district (PED) project needs to be investible whilst providing the municipality and district-dwellers with low-carbon solutions that provide co-benefits to the citizens and local authorities (such as, inter alia, better wellbeing and health, job creation, increased GDP and tourism). In order to assess potential cost and benefits, this paper finds the EPBD’s cost-benefit calculation methodology for the setting of minimum energy performance requirements can be utilised on a district scale by aggregating the individual buildings.JRC.C.2-Energy Efficiency and Renewable

The determinants of research quality in Italy. Empirical evidence using Bibliometric data in the biotech sector

Does the collaboration between firms and universities or other research organisations improves the quality of research? Why do firms collaborate with public research organisations? The rising importance of university- industry collaboration over the last twenty years makes this question a relevant one. We therefore analyse the relationships between firms and universities using data on firms’ publications in scientific journals. Among all channels through which the relationships between universities and firms are built, joint scientific publications appear to be an important but yet little explored one, especially as regards Italy. We consider the case of the biotechnology sector in Italy. Our aim is to analyse the behaviour of the firms with respect to publications and innovation, in order to shed new insights on the peculiarities of the Italian innovation system and the possible policy implications. For this purpose we built a database of all scientific publications of Italian biotechnology firms over the period 1990 to 2006 and we provide evidence on the institutional and geographic nature of publication networks and on the determinants of research quality. We find that the collaboration with universities and international partners, especially if the research networks are large and varied, increases the research quality. We also begun to collect data on firm size from 1997 to 2006, in order to confront them with the data on publications: our preliminary analysis shows that larger firms have a higher propensity to publish, however small (but not micro) firms publish very high quality paper

Aluminum (Oxy)nitride thin films grown by fs-PLD as electron emitters for thermionic applications

Thin films based on aluminum nitride were obtained by fs-laser assisted Pulsed Laser Deposition (fs-PLD) at room temperature on tantalum substrates for studying the electron emission performance in the temperature range 700- 1600 °C, so to investigate the possibility of their exploitation as thermionic cathodes. Results of structural, chemical and morphological analyses show the growth of nanostructured thin films with a significant oxygen contamination, forming a mixture of crystalline aluminum nitride and aluminum oxide as well as metallic aluminum inclusions. Despite the considerable presence of oxygen, the developed cathodes demonstrate to possess promising thermionic emission characteristics, with a work function of 3.15 eV, a valuable Richardson constant of 20.25 A/(cm²K²), and a highly thermo-electronic stability up to operating temperatures of 1600 °C

Biobanks in Europe: Prospects for Harmonisation and Networking

Biobanks (i.e. the organised collections consisting of biological samples and associated data, have gained great significance for research and personalised medicine) are increasingly recognised as a crucial infrastructure for research. However, at the same time the widely varied practices in biobanking regarding for example collection, storage and consent procedures may also pose a barrier to cross-border research and collaboration by limiting access to samples and data. In this context, a recent study indicates that the limited sharing and linkage of samples is a key barrier for research, such as pharmacogenetics. Wide variation is observed in the implementation of relevant existing regulation, which may add further burden to harnessing the public health benefit of these collections. Therefore, it has been suggested that there is a strong need for a harmonised approach on biobanking practices and improved networking of existing and new collections. This Report shows information on the extent of biobanking in Europe, collected through a survey of existing European biobanks regarding both technical aspects (e.g. storage conditions) and aspects of governance and ethics (e.g. sample and data sharing, consent procedures, collaborations etc.). In total, 126 biobanks from 23 countries in Europe were surveyed. Significant lack of harmonisation has been found, especially in the legal aspects (e.g. data protection, consent). This may be partly attributed to the varied interpretation and implementation of EC directives covering aspects of biobanking by national authorities. One of the main complications is that, although the field of data protection is harmonised through the EC directive on data protection, the collection, storage, and sharing of samples is not. Furthermore, in countries that have introduced special biobanks acts it is not always clear where the borderline lies between the scope of these acts and that of the Directive. Indeed, according to the survey, biobanks within the same country reported different practices, suggesting that the problems of harmonization might be higher than expected and claimed. Not only are there different national laws, but apparently within EU member states biobanks do not implement homogenous practices on privacy and data protection issues. Desk research and expert interviews were done to complete the picture presented by the survey. Experts widely recognised the need to improve collaboration and networking among the numerous existing biobanks, as well as new initiatives in Europe (and world-wide). Efficient organisation of these resources through the development, for example, of an infrastructure would potentially facilitate financial sustainability and greatly contribute to the rapid progress of research and development of better diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. The most favoured model involved the development of a virtual biobank that would allow networking of biobanks across different countries and centralisation of data rather than samples. However, several organisational challenges (wide variation in biospecimen collection, storage techniques, data comparability, etc.) may hamper such an effort. The lack of uniform regulatory and ethical requirements and/or practices may pose an additional barrier. The European Commission has already recognised the importance of international biobank projects and many of them have been funded and established in the context of the EU Framework Programmes. To help promote networking of biobanks and thus maximise public health benefits, at least some degree of harmonisation must be achieved. Whether this should be achieved solely at the level of legal/regulatory requirements and practices and/or by technical standardisation requires further investigation. Experts suggested the establishment of an international (rathen than just a European) umbrella (or network) organization, which would establish common operating procedures.JRC.DDG.J.2-The economics of climate change, energy and transpor