UC1

Buildings efficiency

General description of use case

With 40% of total energy consumption, buildings are major consumers of energy causing 36% of the total CO2 emissions. Thereby, the building sector has a large untapped potential for the reduction of CO2 emissions by optimizing in construction and management. The EU has issued a Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings (EPBD) as the main EU policy instrument to improve in this regard (Directive 2002/91/EC). The directive involves a framework for assessing the energy performance of buildings through Energy Performance Certificates (EPCs) that need to include reference values, such as current legal standards. Hence, the relationship between buildings and energy, impacts a wide spectrum from strategic to operational concerns, including energy efficiency investment decisions, buildings energy performance management, energy efficiency policies, smart buildings, and energy disaggregation. This makes data on energy efficiency in buildings crucial for the discussion and the decision-making in many practical contexts by households, academicians, or policymakers. Moreover, a wide variety of information is needed, starting from the existing building stock to solutions in ventilation and air conditioning, socio-demographic information, cultural perception of thermal comfort to climatic and weather information. To some extent, this data is available; however, databases are unorganized and not interlinked. A comprehensive collection of European buildings and urban stock data has been identified by the EFFESUS project, serving as a starting point for the use case.

A specific part of energy consumption in residential buildings is due to the use of household appliances. Time series of corresponding demand profiles on this scale are typically not open, but constitute business assets of utilities. A wealth of information on such data is produced due to the massive rollout of smart meters across Europe. Access to this data raises important concerns regarding privacy issues (Véliz and Grunewald 2018). Thus, legal restrictions as well as commercial interests have to be accounted for. Finally, analyzing this information by e.g. geolocation or social strata is key to mitigate energy poverty making the energy transition inclusive for all.

To this end, the use case on buildings efficiency has three main goals: 1) identifying the available metadata on buildings efficiency and constructing a metadata repository of available data, 2) assessing the level of FAIRness and openness of the available data with the contribution of experts from the field in the planned workshops, and 3) contributing to the FAIRification and opening of the available data respecting privacy concerns. In doing so, it will utilize existing databases such as IEEE,Masea, OpenEI, Open Data Platform for Energy Efficiency in Buildings, the United States Department of Energy databases, the European Buildings Stock Observatory and the databases developed by the ENTRANZE and the ExcEED project. While these databases provide information relevant for, e.g. for the retrofitting of houses, databases specifically targeting electric demand due to household appliances are rare. The few examples include Open Power System Data, ECO ,GREEND, REDD, UK-DALE, OEHU, and home consumption data provided by local British communities. Data regarding energy poverty are collected at the EU Energy Poverty Observatory.

List of selected databases

During the first workshop (see notes from Day 2), the following databases were selected to analyze and improve their compliance with FAIR and Open data principles:

Name of database	Short description	Reasoning of choice	Current state of FAIR/O principles	Target of FAIR/O to achieve within EERAdata
Database 1	Write a short description, e.g., "Database 1 is about XXX, containing XXX data, covering the period xxx."	Summarize shortly the main reasons, why this DB was chosen. Link to the discussion page of WS1UC1.	What is the current FAIR/O state for this database. Summarize here. In case more space is needed, link to a section of the discussion page of WS1UC1.	What FAIR/O target was decided?
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Metadata assessments

Databases above were assessed with respect to their current meta practices. The table belows summarizes the current state and issues identified during WS 1:

Name of database	Type of metadata provided	Extend of metadata provided	Level of implementation of FAIR/O principles	Frameworks for metadata used	Technical implementation of metadata
Database 1	Which types of metadata are covered? Administrative, descriptive, structural, provenance of data, etc.?	Summarize: Is it rich or basic metadata provided for each of the types?	Check the Wilkinson criteria for metadata and summarize here. In case more space is needed, link to a section of the discussion page of WS1.	What framework is used, e.g., controlled vocabulary, taxonomy, thesaurus, ontology?	How are metadata implemented? As xml, plain text, RDF, etc.
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