What's the point?
Content:
The use of the CEN standards not mandatory for the Member States. Why not?
In the case of the Construction Products Directive, the European Commission issues mandates to CEN to make use of CEN standards mandatory for all Member States. The EPBD allows a national/regional differentiation.
The EPBD has stimulated the more rapid development of CEN standards (ENs) for energy calculation procedures for buildings and their systems, and related standards needed to specify buildings and systems performance in relation to the Directive. The European Commission issued a mandate to CEN in order to speed up the development of standards needed for the EPBD implementation.
Within the given short timescale (2004-2007) it was impossible to produce a set of approved and published standards to be implemented in the Member States before the national implementation of the EPBD (mainly 2006). Consequently, Member States, in the preparation of national legislation, had to refer to either existing or new national procedures.
In addition to this, at the time of writing the CEN standards, the experience with integrated energy performance of buildings implemented in national building regulations did not cover the wide range of social cultures, building traditions and climates in Europe. Several of the CEN standards reflect this situation by allowing different options, to be decided at national level.
Nevertheless, most Member States are planning to adopt the CEN standards in one way or another within a few years. The CENSE project organizes the information on the CEN standards and the feed back from the Member States.
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What is the future prospect with regard to the status of the CEN standards?
We expect a further harmonization in the near future. In particular when feed back from the Member States and other target groups leads to recommendations for improvement of the CEN standards and when these recommendations have been implemented in updated versions of the standards in a few years from now.
The CENSE project may play an important role in identifying and removing the barriers and to promote good practice examples.
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Why is standardization at EU level so important?
To day most companies (consultants, manufacturers, contractors) are working internationally. It is therefore important to have international common concepts and calculation methods for energy efficiency of buildings and systems.
For future revision of national building codes European standards must form the basis. Therefore the CENSE project will interact with all partners (building code writers, consultants, manufacturers, educational institutes, etc.).
The point is to establish a two way communication:
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CENSE will provide information about the “European Method” and explain the background and use of the standards.
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CENSE will also gather information on barriers and good practice examples for the use of the standards, from the Member States and other stakeholders and provide feed back to CEN for a future revision of the standards.
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So the future will be one harmonized CEN set of procedures to assess and express the energy performance of buildings?
That would be ideal from the point of view of harmonization, but we have to see to what extent regional differences in Europe still require differentiation in input data and boundary conditions.
This has to do with climate, building tradition (types of building, new and existing, type of skills) and economic and social climate (user behaviour, availability of products, skills), legal setting and quality assurance, but it may also have to do with related national or regional requirements. To name a few:
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on indoor air quality (e.g. affecting the input data on ventilation rates),
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on summer comfort (e.g. affecting the input data on temperature set points),
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on usability of indoor spaces (e.g. affecting the classification of an attic as a storage space or as a study or bedroom).
It will be very interesting and important to learn to what extent such differentiation will remain a barrier for trans-border transparency, in particular on the comparison of the energy performance of buildings between Member States.
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More information