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About us

Who are we?

BuildUPspeed is a EU LIFE research project. In order to reach the 2050 decarbonisation targets, the majority of European buildings require deep renovation. Yet still many supply and demand side barriers prevent building renovation from reaching the necessary scale in both the private and public sector. Several EU H2020 projects have already developed a wealth of solutions for deep renovation as a contribution to the EU Renovation Wave. However, one of the main barriers remains: the absence of market uptake strategies able to capitalize the results of technical and non-technical solutions over the last 5 years. This specific barrier is critical both on policy side as on market side, the missed opportunity of EU funded projects. BuildUPspeed specifically aims, as CET LIFE project, to address this shortcoming, in particular focusing of the power of industrialization in the building industry.

 

Cause and motive

BuildUPspeed builds upon and capitalizes the results and outcomes from relevant and related H2020 projects on deep renovation, specifically projects and actions on prefabrication, BIM adaptation for renovation and industry 4.0. Moreover, BuildUPspeed will also use the approach and utilize networks of several chapters of the ‘Energiesprong’ and ‘Stroomversnelling’ (like in NL, IT, FR, AT).

Several H2020 projects on deep renovation took the initiative to work together as a H2020 Deep Renovation Cluster Project. BuildUPspeed represents a spin-off from these cluster activities, with the strategic collaborative objective of capitalizing lessons learned and key exploitable results, to make the step from exploitation to a real market uptake of innovative renovation practices in Europe, specifically focusing on the market uptake of industrialized solutions, both on product and on process, including technical and economic performance in the life cycle, investment risks analysis, innovative crowd-based mechanisms, and the evaluation of the effect on the global environment.

Key pillars

BuildUPspeed will achieve this by following five key pillars:

  1. Clustering of efforts and evidence capitalizing:
  • key outputs on modular and industrial deep-renovation solutions, both on process and on products, from relevant EU projects; this includes the developments on energy, environmental and economic performances at building level, circularity, re-use of building materials, cost-effectiveness, LCA/LCC, time reduction on building site, and architectural quality (value-charged design for building owners, tenants);
  • key outputs on Building Information Modelling (BIM), adapted to efficient renovation, from relevant EU projects;
  • the existing successful networks from previous related projects (like TripleA-reno, Save the Homes, OpenGala, re-MODULEES etc., see section 1.5) and several chapters of the Energiesprong/Stroomversnelling programs;
  • key outputs on administrative, financing and cultural solutions to over cross the national/local barriers related to the renovation process and its complexity (REMODULEES project).
  1. Inventory of (end-user) needs, actors & capacities, (material and energy) flows and buildings & spaces within a local context (i.e., on neighbourhood/eco-system level). This is an important intermediate step before developing a market activation hub (3).
  2. Digitalizing these key outputs to make them attractive to end-users and easily accessible in virtual Market Activation Hub, in an on-line open-source platform. The Hub brings together supply and demand and defines the market for modular deep-renovation products and concepts
  3. Introducing the concept of fully automated ‘Local’ or ‘Pop-up’ factories and implement this as pilots in a five locations in the countries, involved in BuildUPspeed and three additional locations.
  4. Offering attractive and understandable information on evidence-based performances of renovated buildings to user/owners in order to show the potential of industrialized solutions to reduce the performance gap (both on energy and IEQ).

As BuildUPspeed includes modularity as one of the key cornerstones of the concept (see 1.4), the action addresses in principle all building types, as modular industrialized renovation solutions have a high level of independency and are very versatile to be used in all types of building renovations (and also in new constructions).