Trial / Demo
Across Europe, the renovation of existing buildings has moved to the centre of climate and energy policy. And this is where the recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) is vitally important. It places strong emphasis on long term renovation planning, and recognises that incremental and poorly sequenced upgrades will not deliver the scale of emissions reductions required. Meaning that within this policy context, Building Renovation Passports (BRPs) have emerged as an important mechanism to support staged renovation strategies over time.
Under the EPBD, BRPs are conceived as building specific renovation frameworks that help owners and decision makers plan renovations in a structured and forward looking way. So rather than focusing solely on current performance or compliance, BRPs are designed to provide a step by step renovation roadmap, linking a building’s existing condition to a long term pathway towards deep renovation and, ultimately, zero emission buildings.
Equally as importantly, BRPs are intended to be living documents, evolving alongside buildings, investment cycles, and regulatory requirements, which means they can support decision making over several years.
As the EPBD direction of travel became clearer, attention increasingly shifted from what a BRP is to how it should work in practice, particularly for non residential buildings. Commercial assets are typically renovated over long horizons, with decisions shaped by asset strategies, capital planning cycles, operational constraints, and organisational priorities. In practice, building information is often dispersed across EPCs, audits, spreadsheets, and consultant reports, making it difficult to build a coherent and actionable renovation plan.
This is exactly where BRPs can add value, not as another document, but as a structured framework that helps owners and their advisors plan renovations as a staged pathway, with clarity on sequencing, impacts, and next steps.
In Ireland, the BRP mechanism for the commercial sector is still taking shape. At the outset of this work, it was clear that a tailored, Irish approach would require a coherent BRP pipeline, incorporating:
The BRP project
To support this work, an SEAI funded project coordinated by the Irish Green Building Council (IGBC), with the support of IES and CSTB, was launched to prototype a commercial BRP pipeline for Ireland. The project was scoped as a 21 month programme, explicitly aimed at enabling a smooth national roll out through methodology refinement, training and capacity building, and recommendations for digital storage and user interaction.
A core goal of the project was to bring practical insight to Irish stakeholders (including SEAI and relevant government departments) on how best to deliver Ireland’s BRP obligations in a way that works for the commercial sector and supports real decision‑making.
IES played a strategic enabling role across the project, contributing expertise in:
In parallel, the wider project scope included training and testing with built‑environment professionals and the development of outputs intended for the public good, such as guidance and recommendations that can inform implementation.
What the project set out to deliver
The project was designed to move beyond high‑level definitions and instead generate practical insight on questions such as:
Why this matters now
As the project enters its closing phase in April 2026, the timing is particularly relevant, with the EPBD transposition deadline approaching in May 2026. It all means this work provides concrete, experience based insight into how BRPs can be designed to support staged renovation planning in the commercial sector, combining a structured process with digital foundations that enable long term use, interoperability, and stakeholder friendly access.
👉 In the next post, which you can see now, we’ll share the methodology developed during the project – including the structured BRP process, and the design principles that guided the digital prototype and dashboards.
