BRITA in PuBs

Bringing Retrofit Innovation to Application in Public Buildings

The BRITA in PuBs (Bringing Retrofit Innovation to Application in Public Buildings) project aimed at increasing the market penetration of innovative and effective retrofit solutions to improve the energy efficiency and implement renewables in public buildings, with moderate additional costs.

As the European-wide composed consortium of 23 partners proposed the project in 2003, there was an increase of interest all over Europe to the energy efficiency of buildings due to the just enacted Energy Performance of Buildings Directive of the European Parliament. On the other hand the majority of the public building owners was very sceptical because of the expected additional investments for energy saving measures.

After 48 months of intensive project work, we consider the project as more than successful. The retrofit measures itself helped to reduce the energy consumptions of the buildings in average by more than factor 2 and improved at the same time the user satisfaction by at least factor 2. The economic payback times for the investments have finally been calculated to less than 20 years. All the involved parties pointed out that energy efficient retrofit of public buildings is nowadays a must in the communities.

The project created also a lot of additional public added values. More than 30 deliverables have been developed to assist the daily work in the public building administrations. They include information reports on innovative financial schemes a set of retrofit design guidelines different blackboard information sheets for changing the user behaviour an electronic information tool and benchmark system and a quality control toolbox. Additional there were material and courses developed to train facility managers and educate students in further education and architectural university courses.

All this material is free of charge for download at the project website:www.brita-in-pubs.eu.

All the results achieved in the 4 years have been summarised in the Publishable Final Activity Report, which can be downloaded from the project website.