Strategic framework for sustainable energy renovation policies in educational buildings: a priority-based approach

• This study proposes a framework for prioritizing school building renovations. • The framework prioritizes retrofit through data collection, simulation, and ranking. • The study focused on 103 schools, combining energy prediction models. • Real data enabled building taxonomy definition and calibration of results. • Three prioritization methods address different energy and non-energy related goals. To enhance the sustainability of the construction sector, public and private entities should increase their efforts to define the priority interventions to improve the performance of their properties, including educational buildings. In Italy, most of the schools were built before 1976 without considering energy-saving measures, thus they are in urgent need of renovation. Due to the limited nature of resources, facility managers are increasingly asked to prioritize interventions across the owned building stock, to ensure optimal resource allocation. This work presents an energy performance-based prioritization framework to address educational building stock renovation scenarios, based on three key steps: data collection, energy simulation and priority assignment. It was applied to an educational building stock of 103 buildings in northern Italy. Detailed information was gathered through archival research and on-site inspections, thus returning a full taxonomy of the building stock. Energy simulations were carried out both for the existing and renovated scenarios using an urban building energy modeling tool; results were calibrated with real consumption data, thus providing a realistic energy saving potential for the building stock investigated. The final step consists in analysing three approaches to set renovation priorities reflecting different stakeholders’ goals and perspective: this allowed the development of a replicable methodology for organizing and ranking refurbishment actions by priority, while optimizing resources, minimizing costs, and maximizing effectiveness. Further research will include the integration of non-energy-related factors that might influence the renovation priority assessment, such as structural and social aspects. This comprehensive approach aims to address the multiple needs of educational building stocks.