Energy retrofit of historic and existing buildings. The legislative and regulatory point of view

• Historic buildings (i.e. listed buildings) are preserved by regulations on cultural and landscape heritage.
• EU directives calls for reductions in energy consumption and retrofit is required for existing buildings.
• European directives are only related to energy savings in existing buildings and do not clearly afford the historical buildings.
• Potentially historic buildings (i.e. historical) are not protected and thus their historical value might be not preserved when retrofit is applied.
• National Architectural Heritage bodies have to act on European Union for better defining what kind of energy retrofit can be applied to historic and historical buildings to preserve their value.

The building sector is one of the key consumers of energy in Europe; consequently, European Union has enacted several directives dealing, directly and indirectly, with energy efficiency in building aiming to reduce the buildings energy use. Those directives, while dealing with existing buildings, do not take care of the Architectural Heritage in a specific uniform way adopting the derogation regime: exceptions are available at the national level to exclude from their application buildings listed in the Architectural Heritage as historic buildings. Thus any country can adopt its own rules to include or exclude buildings from respecting the energy efficiency requirements for existing buildings. Consequently, up to now no general rules, codes and standards are available for energy retrofit of historical and architectural valuable buildings. On the other side, no international act, in the field Architectural Heritage conservation, deals with energy and energy retrofit. Furthermore, the European Union Treaty does not comprise the Cultural Heritage as matter of European legislation. Thus to cover this gap between historic/historical building and energy retrofit a lobbying action is needed, managed by the national Cultural Heritage authorities, which can steers EU policy in a more effective way towards energy retrofit of historic/historical buildings.