From Theory to Tools: The MODERATE Project and the Future of Building Energy Data in Europe

The MODERATE project recently concluded its four-year journey with a final conference held on 21 April 2026 at the Castello del Valentino in Turin — a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the historic campus of Politecnico di Torino, co-organiser of the event alongside REHVA and EURAC Research. The afternoon session, broadcast live online, showcased the project’s analytical tools and opened a broader discussion on the role of building data in enabling the energy transition.

Breaking Down Structural Barriers to Building Data

Despite buildings accounting for around 40% of Europe’s energy consumption, the sector has long struggled with fragmented, siloed data — incompatible formats, privacy concerns, and governance gaps that prevent effective benchmarking and performance analysis. As Project Coordinator Cristian Pozza (EURAC Research) explained in his opening presentation, MODERATE was designed to provide a structural response to these challenges, not just by creating a data repository, but by building end-to-end data analytics and software infrastructure that others can build upon.

The project’s primary output is a modular, open-source ecosystem covering three layers of functionality:

·         Operational analytics: tools for anomaly detection, energy performance forecasting, and measurement & verification (M&V);

·         Stock-level planning: support for building benchmarking, geo-clustering, and renovation de-risking;

·         Data quality & interoperability: standardisation layers and synthetic data generation to enable privacy-preserving collaboration across organisations.

One notable contribution highlighted during the session is BrickLLM, an open-source tool that leverages Large Language Models to generate RDF files compliant with the BrickSchema ontology directly from natural-language building descriptions — lowering the technical barrier to structured data representation significantly.

A key design principle throughout was the distinction between real data — used for internal analysis and model training — and synthetic data, which preserves statistical and spatial structure while enabling external sharing and collaboration. As Pozza noted, the challenge is not just where to store data, but how to give it meaning through metadata, and how to create the trust infrastructure that allows it to flow across institutional boundaries.

The CACER Simulator: An Example of Open Collaboration

One of the presentations at the final conference illustrated how the MODERATE infrastructure can serve as a foundation for broader collaborative development. Federico Aleotti (RSE – Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico) presented the CACER Simulator, an open-source tool for evaluating Renewable Energy Communities (RECs) under the Italian regulatory framework, developed with contributions from the MODERATE project.

The CACER Simulator exemplifies the open innovation approach that MODERATE has sought to promote: rather than duplicating existing tools, the project has focused on creating interoperable building blocks that others can build upon. The simulator draws on pyBuildingEnergy — the EN ISO 52016-based building energy library developed within MODERATE — for its thermal modelling layer, and RSE is working to deepen this integration as a next development step.

Beyond this specific case, the conference highlighted a broader pattern: MODERATE's open-source codebase and modular architecture are designed precisely to enable this kind of cross-project reuse, reducing duplication of effort across the European research community and accelerating the path from research tool to deployable service.

Panel Discussion: From Building Data to Grid Flexibility

The afternoon session concluded with a panel titled "From Building Data to Grid Flexibility: Research, Policy and Market Perspectives," moderated by Rongling Li (DTU, Operating Agent of IEA EBC Annex 96), and with the participation of Daniele Antonucci (EURAC Research), Dick van Dijk (EPB Centre), Stephen White (CSIRO, Operating Agent of IEA EBC Annex 96), and Antonino Rollo (RSE). Bringing together expertise from energy performance standardisation, grid-integrated building control, flexibility markets, and the MODERATE platform itself, the discussion converged on a set of shared observations that are worth reflecting on as the project transitions from research to deployment.

A first point of consensus was that the bottleneck in data-driven building energy is no longer technological maturity. Frameworks, analytics tools, and synthetic data techniques are sufficiently advanced. The real barrier is data governance and incentives: organisations rarely share data unless they receive something tangible in return. Addressing this requires structural solutions — whether through European directives, sector-specific governance mechanisms, or clearly defined reciprocal benefits — rather than relying on voluntary participation alone.

A second theme concerned the readiness of energy performance standards to support grid interaction. The current framework, which relies on fixed annual primary energy factors, needs improvement to capture the value of flexible, smart building operation. Moving towards sub-hourly or at least hourly dynamic primary energy factors — reflecting real-time supply-demand balance and renewable generation forecasts — is a necessary evolution if standards are to properly account for the benefits of demand-side flexibility.

Third, the panel addressed the trust gap between the buildings sector and electricity networks. While standards for interoperability broadly exist, real-world compliance often falls short, and network operators remain wary of building-side flexibility resources whose response is inherently variable. The key insight is that individual buildings may behave unpredictably, but aggregated portfolios can deliver statistically reliable contributions — a concept of “firmness” that the electricity industry needs to internalise. Building this trust requires not only technical demonstrations, but also agreed baselines and measurement protocols that give network operators confidence in the resource they are contracting.

From a market development perspective, Italy was discussed as a country with growing momentum in energy communities — supported by the national CACER regulatory framework — but still in an early phase when it comes to local flexibility markets. Only a handful of pilot projects are currently active, and the primary barriers are regulatory rather than technical: the need for simpler access rules for distributed assets, stable remuneration mechanisms, and standardised flexibility product definitions. Energy communities were identified as a natural aggregation vehicle and a promising entry point for scaling flexibility participation.

The panel closed with a call for systemic action: embedding grid-readiness requirements directly into building codes is one of the most effective levers available. Denmark was cited as a concrete example, where Smart Readiness Assessment is now mandatory for large new buildings — a model that other European countries could adapt to accelerate the deployment of flexible, data-enabled buildings at scale.

The Platform is Live and Ready to Use

While MODERATE will officially close in May 2026, the consortium has committed to a three-year maintenance period for the platform. The work ahead, as Pozza underlined in his closing remarks, is not about research — it is about execution and adoption. The infrastructure is in place; the question now is who will use it and how.

HVAC professionals, energy service companies (ESCOs), building managers, and policy analysts can access:

·         The MODERATE platform at moderate.cloud, including the data marketplace and analytics tools.

·         The full codebase on GitHub (MODERATE-Project organisation), released under open-source licencing.

·         Technical documentation at moderate-project.github.io/moderate-docs.

As Pozza noted in closing, the core idea of MODERATE is to provide a safe environment to experiment with data-driven tools, regardless of technical background. 'It's not the ending point. It's just a starting point' — a message particularly relevant for SMEs in the building sector navigating the challenges of digitalisation.

What Comes Next

The MODERATE Final Conference was immediately followed, on 22–24 April 2026 at the same venue, by the 2nd Expert Meeting of IEA EBC Annex 96 on Grid-Integrated Control of Buildings. The back-to-back structure was intentional: it reflected the kind of cross-community collaboration — between European research projects, IEA working groups, standardisation bodies, and industrial partners — that is needed to translate analytical tools into lasting market and regulatory change.

Barriers remain. Access to granular distribution grid data and energy consumption profiles continues to limit both tool validation and market design. But as the panellists collectively argued, these are governance and regulatory challenges more than technical ones — and that is arguably good news, because they are addressable through policy, standardisation, and committed institutional collaboration.

More information

Project website: https://moderate-project.eu/

Platform: www.moderate.cloud

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/showcase/moderate-he