Smart Readiness Indicator and Indoor Environmental Quality: two case studies in Italy and Portugal

The use and integration of smart technologies inside buildings in planned renovations is a point addressed in the Directive (EU) 2018/844 that also introduces the Smart Readiness Indicator (SRI), a new indicator to assess the readiness of buildings to adapt itself to users and grid needs. With this new indicator, the Directive aims to communicate more directly to more people (users, owners, etc.) the added value of having ICT technologies in a building. If users understand the value of this transformation, they are more motivated to invest time and money in it. The indicator is then defined as a tool that provides information about the readiness of buildings to interact with external energy networks and occupants of the buildings to ensure more efficient operation and better energy performance through ICT technologies. The evaluation of the indicator, through the verification of the services present, allows potential investors to understand how to target their resources in a hypothetical retrofit. To better understand the functioning of this indicator, it was decided to apply it to two case studies, an Italian and a Portuguese one. This experiment allowed in the first case to use a critical approach going not only to assess the level of readiness of the building, but also to identify the shortcomings and difficulties in applying the methodology proposed by the European project. In the second case, the evaluation of the SRI allowed a comparison of two different approaches in defining the comfort of an indoor environment: one more scientific based on the use of recorded data and indices obtained by them and the other obtained through the calculation of the indicator. In the second application the aim was also to find a hypothetical univocal definition of the weighting coefficients to be applied in the methodology.