Impact assessment for the remaining 20 Member States

The objective of deliverable 9.6 is to evaluate the replication potential of the SINFONIA approach in the 20 European countries that have not been represented in the project as pilot cities (Austria and Italy) or as Early Adopter Cities (Cyprus, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden).

The main output of the SINFONIA project is the “district template” approach: a comprehensive interdisciplinary refurbished city district model for middle-sized European cities, which objective is to facilitate the implementation and replication of large-scale refurbishment plans by providing optimal retrofitting solution for each type of district.

District model analysed in the project answers mainly to the retrofitting need of pilot cities, Innsbruck and Bolzano, located in Austria and Italy. Both cities, however, are fully representative of a medium-size city in Europe and of their energy needs and constitute thus a sound foundation to replication actions. With the aim to identify the countries that can benefit the most form the SINFONIA approach, we have conducted a classification of the 25 remaining countries according to their “distance” to the reference situation. This distance was assessed based on a comparison of key characteristics of each city in comparison to the pilot cities.

Five dimensions have been analysed to elaborate this classification:
1. National policies and regulation, as a contextual parameter impacting energy retrofit at city, district or building scales
2. Sociological features about eco-innovation, referring to the readiness of citizens with regard to energy transition
3. Urban profile as a composite index characterizing the residential building stock in urban areas of the country
4. Energy price, as a global driver ruling energy refurbishment (and more generally energy transition) economics
5. Climate zone, since directly impacting the energy needs and the type of solutions among the SINFONIA portfolio of options.