Europe is once again eyeing international energy markets with unease. The war in Ukraine, geopolitical tensions in the Middle East and the extreme volatility of gas prices are all stark reminders of a painful truth: the continent’s energy security is still at the mercy of external factors.
The standard response to energy crises is to hunt for new suppliers, bolster reserves, or accelerate the roll-out of renewables. While necessary, these strategies often overlook a less visible but equally critical lever: reducing how much energy our buildings actually use in the first place.
But there’s a major roadblock to making this happen, as Europe does not accurately measure thermal and energy properties. Instead, the continent’s energy efficiency ratings rely on generic data, usually derived from averages or regulatory default values of construction materials as opposed to a building’s actual thermal behaviour.
This makes it almost impossible to clearly predict how well energy-saving measures will work. What buildings need is something akin to the nutritional information we find on food packaging, which rigorously lists ingredients and nutrients. Just as we know exactly what we’re buying and eating, we should also know exactly how every building behaves – as opposed to an estimated average.
To achieve true energy resilience and sovereignty, we therefore need more than just new hardware; we also need a fundamental shift in how we handle material data. Precision here is not a magic fix, but the foundation of ensuring that efficiency efforts translate into real-world savings.
Read more:
Want to cut your energy bills? Here’s how five experts are doing it
The mirage of ‘average values’
Buildings account for a massive share of Europe’s energy consumption, and every improvement in insulation or design translates directly into less external dependency for heating or cooling.
Today, tools like Building Energy Modelling (BEM) allow us to simulate performance before construction begins. But these simulations are only as good as the information we feed them. If the data is generic or outdated, the resulting decisions are fundamentally flawed.
In practice, most digital libraries represent materials using average values, creating a precision gap that undermines strategic goals. We should think of materials as the DNA of a structure. Just as personalised medicine uses a patient’s specific genetic map to prevent disease, architecture needs the exact physical and hygrothermal “map” of its materials.
Without this, we are essentially treating buildings blind, relying on generic diagnoses that fail to predict thermal bridges or hidden inefficiencies. If we use generic data, a simulation might promise a high-performance building, but the finished reality often performs as much as 10% or 20% worse.
Put simply, we cannot achieve energy sovereignty if our buildings’ performance is based on approximations.
Read more:
Buildings consume 30% of global energy – digital twins could be the key to cutting their waste
From PDF spec sheets to digital passports
For decades, material data has been trapped in static PDF catalogues, making it useless for modern digital simulation. The solution is digital traceability. The EU is already pushing for the Digital Product Passport (DPP), a tool designed to provide electronically accessible information on products to improve sustainability and circularity throughout their life cycle.
This initiative works alongside the Construction Products Regulation (CPR), the EU’s legal framework that ensures all construction products speak the same technical language through standardised performance declarations, and the newly revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), which mandates strict efficiency targets to reach zero-emission goals.
Together, these measures mark a clear path from static data derived from averages to machine-readable precision.
Read more:
Why Europe’s ‘open’ economy of innovation is exposed to global trade shifts
Better building means better measuring
When designing a building, one single ill-informed material choice can lock it into excess costs and inefficient energy demand for its entire half-century lifespan. And in a landscape of high energy prices and uncertain supply, design deviations carry even more weight than they did in the past.
What once seemed like minor technical details have been transformed by geopolitical reality into a strategic imperative. Energy security is not just fought over in pipelines or ports, but also in the millions of technical choices made by architects and engineers every year.
Every energy crisis reminds us to secure our supply. But it should also remind us of something equally vital: the most secure, cheapest, cleanest energy is the energy we never have to consume in the first place.
To achieve true energy sovereignty, we must design and retrofit our buildings with greater technical precision. Just as no one would plan a rigorous medical diet using only approximate nutritional values, it makes little sense to project the future of our cities using materials described as mere averages. A truly efficient building does not start on the construction site; it starts with the quality of the data we use to design it.
A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!
