What is the idea behind INSTRUCT project?

Understanding that both raising awareness and training specific skills in the construction sector is a huge commitment,

INSTRUCT intends to create a complete operational framework to increase the number of skilled building professionals and blue collar workers over the whole value chain (both for renovations and new constructions), and offer a set of service to support raising awareness of home and building owners and tenants about the benefits of sustainable energy skills, and the public authorities for the development of new legislative frameworks, e.g. requirements for skilled workers in public procurement.

The INSTRUCT project will raise awareness of stakeholders in the construction value chain about environmental challenges, current and future sustainability scenarios, and energy efficiency targets, and EC and governments agendas, with a view of delivering energy efficient built environment interventions across lifecycle and supply chain. In that respect, the project is informed by the extensive knowledge of the project participants in the energy efficiency agenda, with a focus on the built environment, reflected by the wide range of experiences acquired in recently completed FP7 projects, such as SPORTE2 (260124), KnoholEM (609154), STREAMER (608739), PERFORMER (609154), and the H2020 BIMEET (753994) project, which have highlighted the endemic energy performance gap in buildings in requiring a multi-disciplinary and total lifecycle approach.

Energy Performance Gap across Lifecycle

 

What we want to achieve?

• Quantitative and qualitative evidences that corroborate and reinforce the correlation between skills and education and energy performance and quality;
• a set of tools and instruments facilitating the mutual recognition of energy skills and qualifications in the construction sector;
• real-world demonstrations (in 5 geographical European areas) of the usefulness and ease of use of the deployed instruments for recognition of energy skills and qualifications;
• dissemination and awareness raising actions in consortium members countries, scaled up to the wider Europe;
• new legislative frameworks enabling reliance on skilled workers in public / private procurement.

 

What impact do we expect?

Construction is a key component of the EU strategy and, faces huge pressure from EU and national regulations. Buildings represent 40% of primary energy consumption in the EU and between 30 and 40% of CO2 emissions depending on national energy mixes. Improving the EE of European buildings is a key step in achieving the 2030 and 2050 EU energy and CO2 emission targets. In addition, construction sector is still facing the consequences of the economic crisis, which has reduced the investment capacities. The European sector is a strong economic sector (10% of the EU GDP). This is one of the reasons why the financing of the required European building stock enhancement through deep renovation (up to 100 bn € per year until 2020), is recognized as a challenge by the EC. Cost-effectiveness and productivity are the two overarching issues for European Construction businesses.