Economic assessment on the real renovation costs of buildings energy retrofit in Italy: a workflow to define independent investment expenses

The building stock energy renovation process is a key challenge when dealing with decarbonization policies, as buildings represent a great fraction of global carbon emission. The European Union is trying to foster this process with increasingly strict directives, as the new Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, but renovation investment costs still seem to represent a great barrier for most people. With reference to multiple studies and analysis done, the cost of such renovations is too high compared to the energy saving achieved and there is a concern about the financial feasibility of them. For this reason, this thesis aims at addressing this problem with a detailed analysis of the real renovation costs of buildings energy retrofit in Italy. The focus is to investigate if in reality, these costs are as high as national reports usually state, since a considerable part of the investments are usually maintenance costs. In this work, access to real renovation data of almost 50 buildings in Italy is given to analyze the direct renovation expenses and associated maintenance costs to clarify the financial load on building owners. Results show that, as expected, not all the renovation costs are directly link to the renovation investment, but a large fraction of the expenses would still be paid to keep the building at the current state, influencing also payback time and financial convenience. This is important as it can be reflected in Italy’s national plan to reach the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive 2024 to reach their goal in meeting Zero Emission Buildings standards by 2028 for public buildings and eventually for the whole building stock by 2050, by planning for related incentives to pursue and speed up the renovations.