The QUEST consortium held its final event at the CLIMA 2022 HVAC World Congress on 24 May in Rotterdam. The workshop “Sustainable Finance: The EU Taxonomy & Building Performance Gap” gave an overview of the QUEST toolbox and how it supports to de-risk green investments by closing the building performance gap.

Recording coming soon

The workshop was divided into two parts which connected widely debated topics to the QUEST toolbox. The first part focused on the EU Taxonomy and how Quality Management Services can help investors to be aligned with Taxonomy requirements. While the second part focused on the impact of the building performance gap on the financial value of building units and how QUEST can to budget measures to mitigate this gap.

Frank Hovorka, Past President of REHVA, gave the keynote speech and focused on the importance on the collection of reliable building data in order to assess different indicators, e.g. embodied & operational carbon, primary & measured energy use, …)  which impacts the financial value of buildings to different degrees.

This was followed with a presentation by project coordinator Dr. Stefan Plesser (synavision GmbH) on why Quality Management Services are an essential to effectively transform Europe’s building stock to become green. Ole Teisen (Sweco Denmark) continued with a demonstration on how QMS can help investors to align their building portfolios with the EU Taxonomy requirements.

During the panel discussion that followed, the audience indicated that the biggest barriers to get building portfolios aligned with the Taxonomy were “lack of reliable building data” and “uncertainty with financial actors on how to meet the requirements”. In the panel Stefan Plesser & Ole Teisen stressed that QUEST supports to mitigate both issues, by providing a data set that helps to reliably collect building data and by supporting the integration of QMS which can help financial actors to be Taxonomy-aligned.

The second part on Building Performance Gap started of with a presentation by Prof. Dr. Ivo Martinac (Royal Institute of Technology – KTH) on what this gap exactly was and which indicators this could impact (higher energy consumption than expected, higher operational costs, not meeting legal requirements, …) which all could have an influence on the financial value of building units.

Cormac Ryan (COPILOT – Building Commissioning Certification) presented the QUEST Tool which is an easy-to-use tool that helps investors to calculate the financial added value of QMS into building projects and can help de-risk green building investments by ensuring that the pre-design requirements by investors/owners are met in building projects.

Programme: