Effectiveness of Materials, Technologies, and Renewable Energy in Educational Buildings Through Cluster Analysis of Energy Retrofitting

This paper is part of wider research on a stock of 80 schools and their energetic retrofit projects financed by the EU in the Lazio region in 2016 to reduce CO2 emissions. Because in these procedures the suggested retrofit strategies are often selected on the basis of common best practices (considering average energy savings), but are not supported by proper energy investigations, following the principles of an evidence-based approach, we analysed all the information on the interventions and developed a database to support public administration in future informed financing processes. All the design choices – including the use of eco-materials, envelope technologies and renewable energy sources – have been studied in relation to context, climate zone, school typology, use, construction quality and costs. Three levels of investigation have been defined to identify significant clusters according to reported data: data analysis, monitoring and field surveys, and observations of technological performance of the interventions. For each cluster, the most representative actual building was identified to allow comparability of different materials and technologies, to control and plan new energy retrofit interventions, thereby reducing inefficiencies. For each representative building, a validating procedure based on dynamic simulation was developed. In this paper, a picture of the interventions regarding the use of materials and technologies for envelope retrofitting is given. The first results highlight that the interventions have an effective energy performance overall, but they have many deficiencies in terms of environmental quality of the materials used and nothing has been done to comply with the guidelines of the recent minimum environmental criteria (CAM).