Novel methods for energy efficiency in buildings: Horizon 2020 IMPRESS project

Despite the efforts dedicated and the measures implemented to improve and achieve a more sustainable European building sector, it seems like not enough has been done to meet the energy and climate goals established by the EU.

There is evidence that the new buildings are not a potential market anymore. As a consequence, existing buildings have become the main target due to the fact that through their renovation, a large amount of energy savings could potentially be obtained. A really ambitious and idyllic target could be to achieve that the entire European building stock comprises Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (NZEB) by 2050.

Therefore, the EU is taking on this renovation challenge, considering 2016 as “key year for policy development” in building renovation. During this year, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Energy (DG Energy) is carrying out a review process of two of the most important pieces of legislation related to building renovation, the Directives on Energy Performance of Buildings (EPBD)¹ and on Energy Efficiency (EED)².

Besides, further research and demonstration efforts are necessary in various domains relating to building renovation. Hence the action is being taken by research and innovation projects using the Intelligent Energy Europe (IEE) and 7^th Framework Programme (FP7) funds and, more recently, the Horizon 2020 programme, as well as the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF).

IMPRESS is one of the ongoing projects where Geonardo is participating, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme that aims to develop new technologies and techniques to improve energy efficiency in buildings constructed between 1950 and 1975. IMPRESS will develop a new range of easy to install panels, which reduce energy demand while preserving or improving the building aesthetics.

During the project, two demonstration sites are used to assess three new different prefabricated panels. On April 5th, the Geonardo team travelled to one of the sites in Drobeta Turnu Severin (Romania) to meet IMPRESS partners. Moreover, some tests were performed in order to understand the current status of the demo building in terms of energy efficiency. These tests consisted of the placement of some data loggers to monitor the building climate conditions, a thermal imaging and a 3D scanning of the building.

    

The 3D scanning was performed by Geonardo. This scanning provides a 3D digital representation of a specific object, in this case a building, through a collected data called ‘point cloud’. The point cloud will be used to build a 3D model that will form the basis of a BIM (Building Information Model).

Point Cloud of the demo site in Drobeta Turnu Severin (Romania)

Without doubt, it is really interesting to be able to reproduce, in such accurate manner, a real object. Especially when you are dealing with old buildings in which, in most of the cases, the original appearance of the façade could be protected and needs to be kept.

1 Directive 2010/31/EU on the energy performance of buildings

2 Directive 2012/27/EU on energy efficiency

 

By: Irene Ramirez

Looking for a Marketing Specialist – Join Europe’s leading provider of practical solutions on EU project development and management

Europa Media was founded in 2003 by two individuals who wanted to share their experience gained in proposal development and project management under EU programmes with other interested parties. The EU funding system is complex and the competition to get a project financed by the EU is tough. Specific knowledge, well-established networks and certain skills are needed to successfully get involved in these competitive projects. Europa Media’s mission has thus been to provide clear and structured information about EU funding and improve the skills of people in project development and management. Since its establishment, Europa Media has developed, launched and publicised a variety of information sources and tools including web platforms, publications and events to facilitate access to EU funding and simplify EC project development and management. To date, we have organized hundreds of training courses attended by thousands of participants from all over Europe and beyond. We have also supported many universities, research organisations and SMEs on an advisory/in-house capacity in their efforts to develop winning proposals and effectively implement their projects. Read more about us at www.eutrainingsite.com and www.europamedia.org.

Europa Media is now looking for a creative mind to support our sales and marketing team in promoting our training courses, other services and project results more effectively to our target audiences. As a small company with an international team, Europa Media has a flexible structure and a pragmatic working style. Traditional marketing approaches are typically not sufficient for Europa Media’s activities and products. Therefore, flexibility, continuous innovation and pragmatism are must-have skills for the successful candidates. Please apply only if you consider that your personality and working style would fit such a working environment.

Main roles and responsibilities

1. Information provision and publications

• Contribute to developing and maintaining information and web portals of Europa Media
• Support the development and preparation of training material (workshops, brochures, useful documen)

2. Online Marketing

• Support the maintenance and updating of the training web platform: eutrainingsite.com
• Manage the Member Area of the training web platform
• Manage and keep up-to-date Europa Media’s social network accounts/pages: Facebook, Twitter, Scribd, Slideshare, LinkedIn

3. PR

• Build up contacts and networks for Europa Media and our projects (online and face-to-face)
• Present Europa Media, our projects, products and services directly at relevant exhibitions, seminars and conferences

4. Database building

• Maintain and update existing databases
• Maintain and update the CRM system (Bitrix)

5. Sales

• Support the responsible staff in sales strategy building
• Support service/product research and development
• Support the project management team in project marketing
• Support the implementation of the advertisement strategy of the company
• Support the sales team in coordinating the advertisements, communication, database development

6. Communication

• Compose messages in English to clients and interested people about our services
• Communicate in English via e-mail and phone with clients and partners
• Support the responsible staff in handling customer/participant registrations and inquiries

Required Skills and Qualifications

• University degree or college diploma
• experience in international marketing and sales (minimum of 2 years experience is required)
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English; other languages are an asset

You will be a perfect fit for Europa Media if:

• You have experience in working both independently as part of a team
• You are able to identify opportunities for improvement and makes constructive suggestions for change
• You can keep track of lessons learned and share those with team members
• You can conform to shifting priorities, demands and timelines through analytical and problem-solving skills
• You react to project adjustments and alterations promptly and efficiently
• You are flexible during times of change
• You are persuasive, encouraging, and motivating

What we offer

• A competitive compensation and benefits package
• Great working environment (based in the Graphisoft Park in Budapest) within a young and international team

To apply to the position, please send your CV and a creative introduction about yourself, your motivation for applying and a summary of your past achievements in any format you find suitable. Send your application to hr@europamedia.org with the subject “Marketing Specialist”.

An insider’s view to redress in Horizon 2020

There is a standard mechanism in the Horizon 2020 proposal evaluation process (similarly to the previous framework programmes) that is not frequently discussed and covered compared to other aspects of the same sequence: the redress procedure.

There are three possible outcomes of an Evaluation Summary Report (ESR) sent by the EC to inform the consortium how their proposal performed. The best case scenario is when your scores are flying high and you are informed that based on these results your proposal has reached the stage of Grant Agreement preparation. In this case you are happy and you proceed accordingly.

Worst case scenario means that the received scores are not sufficient to catapult your proposal to the project implementation phase and the evaluators’ comments in the ESR follow through systematically the weaknesses, flaws and shortcomings of your concept (out of scope, not sound, not credible etc), or the proposal itself (not enough/too ambitious, weak impacts, insufficient consortium). Even though sometimes it is tough to face such objective criticism, most of the time swallowing your pride will reveal that those cited issues were indeed present and you have a chance to improve your related skills based on this feedback to have better success in your next venture.

There is a third potential outcome, which is kind of a mixture of the previous two. On one hand your scores clearly indicate that your proposal did not meet the required standards, thus cannot be ranked for funding, but on the other hand the reasoning behind those scores raise some doubts on your side whether the evaluators have managed to grasp fully the essence of your idea. For such instances the consortium has a tool at its disposal to challenge the result by initiating a redress procedure. This is the part where blacks and whites transform into the 100 shades of gray and you will have to be extra careful to remain objective on your claims, because only remaining on those grounds you may hope a different outcome. If you start making claims on subjective matters (statements starting with the phrases „in our opinion…”, „we believe…” etc) it is almost guaranteed that your redress will not bring any new results other than the one you already have, a failed proposal. In other words, your reasoning has to be rock solid, pointing out procedural errors and/or inconsistencies in the evaluation process rather than clashing you opinion on the subject with the evaluators’.

The redress process goes like this: The official e-communication from the EC with the Evaluation Summary Report as an attachment (generally received 4-5 months after submitting your proposal) includes information on the means of redress too. It says that you may request an “evaluation review” on the procedural aspects of the evaluation (not the merits of the proposal). This request must be submitted by the coordinator of your consortium within 30 days after receiving this communication (This is kind of tricky, because normally you wouldn’t be able to draw conclusions regarding the procedural accuracy of the evaluation process, per se, by simply reading the evaluators’ comments, but you can immediately challenge inaccuracies in those feedback that 99%-time qualify as confronting the evaluators’ initial comments).

If you decide that you will embark on this quest requesting the Commission to re-evaluate its previous conclusions on your proposal, be prepared that final decisions might end up taking up to 5 months total to receive.

Once you have submitted your redress you’ll receive an automatic notification from the Commission’s services confirming the creation of your request for redress. This notification also sets out the schedule of future actions related to the procedure. According to that, a reply will be provided within 15 business days after the expiry of the redress deadline. This response is either a definitive one (no further discussion about the proposal evaluation is possible) or it will indicate the time of receiving a definitive response (it may take a few months).

In our case, partially in line with the latter scenario, precisely 4 weeks (not 15 days) after the deadline to submit the evaluation review request we were contacted by the head of the responsible agency informing us that they will contact us as soon as our request had been examined (“reply planned for no later than 3 months” to the actual date), hence the term “non-definitive response”. At this stage you have nothing else to do, but to wait patiently and hope for the best. In our case we received the official communication on the very day mentioned in their earlier message (“no later than DD/MM”) at 6:30pm.

Unfortunately the evaluators did not share our concerns regarding the numerous contradictions and confusing phrasings that had burdened the first ESR. In this second document, the EC informed us that they did not find grounds to support our complaints. “The review confirmed that the evaluation procedure was carried out in accordance with the applicable procedures (…), ensuring fairness, transparency and equal treatment.”

At this point, 5 months after receiving the first evaluation summary report we have concluded that we have exhausted the available tools to raise our concerns, thus we have stopped pursuing any further actions in this regard. It was a hard pill to swallow given the amount of efforts invested in the proposal preparation, but sometime you just have to accept certain decisions.

It is clear that this lengthy process tests the determination and dedication of those consortia with failed proposals, however if you believe that your idea stands a better chance if it comes to a repeated evaluation, don’t get discouraged by the process.

By: Istvan Pari

Force majeure in EU projects in practice

No matter how detached an average Horizon 2020 R&I project in general may seem from global politics, certain aspects still can affect even the most research focused initiative with no ties whatsoever to politics or global security.

Even though the suicide bombings in Madrid and London over a decade ago were terrible with devastating numbers of victims and casualties, retrospectively they did not seem to have the same effect which now tends to creep into our everyday life here in Europe on the wake of the dreadful events occurred in Paris, Brussels and Istanbul recently. Ever since the attack on Charlie Hebdo, Europe started to have a sample of the bitter taste what it feels like not taking your safety granted. The coordinated attacks in November 2015 reinforced this notion and brought it to a whole new level, by targeting random civilians at multiple locations at the same time, rather than focusing the wrath of a few selected jihadists with a twisted justification on a few journalists. Until that point you might have felt that since you do not mock Islam you might be safe, but the Bataclan proved you wrong. The bombings in Brussels recently aimed at the very foundation of how we live our lives here in the EU. For a few days, Europe’s capital resembled a warzone, with soldiers armed to the teeth patrolling the streets, public transportation suspended, businesses and schools closed and in general the whole city felt safer behind doors. Needles to say, all pre-scheduled activities for those days of state-of-emergency got cancelled, postponed or re-scheduled for safety reasons.

The attacks hitting the most touristic areas of Istanbul followed a similar pattern, targeting foreigners, though with a touch of putting pressure on the Turkish Government about certain elements of its foreign policy.

It is evident that such a climate does not favour certain activities such as having project meetings that on one hand are essential from a managerial point of view, and on the other hand often require international travel to a number of exotic locations, that up until recently were considered safe to visit; but some of them – at least temporarily – are on the list of non-advised destinations, such as Istanbul. In 2016, the city has already been hit twice with both attacks targeting popular touristic areas killing 15 and injuring 36.

The relevance of all this in our case is that the second general assembly meeting for one of our ongoing Horizon 2020 projects was announced in February, and the Turkish partner kindly offered that they would happily host the meeting in Istanbul at the selected date in early April. The preparations went well, flights were arranged and accommodations were booked when just 3 weeks before the set date the second suicide bombing took place in the heart of the city. The following day the first emails started to land in the coordinator’s mailbox (the whole consortium in cc) with essentially the same type of message appearing in all of them “…under these circumstances our team feel unsafe and decided not to travel”. A few days later a decision was made to cancel the meeting and hold it at a later date elsewhere. This could be considered as an example of force majeure that is covered under Article 51 of the H2020 Annotated Model Grant Agreement (AGA).

According to the AGA’s definition „In case of force majeure, a party will be excused from not fulfilling its obligations (…)‘Force majeure’ relates to an extraordinary event or situation that is beyond the party’s control and that prevents it from fulfilling its obligations under the GA. The event or situation must be inevitable (despite the beneficiary’s due diligence, i.e. level of care that can reasonably be expected from a beneficiary, in order to ensure the fulfilment of its obligations under the GA) and unforeseeable. Force majeure can NOT be used to justify situations caused by a beneficiary’s negligence or by events that could reasonably have been anticipated. Force majeure normally has no specific effects on the eligibility of costs. For example: Airline tickets bought for a beneficiary to attend a meeting related to the action. The flight is cancelled due to a volcano eruption, making it impossible for the beneficiary to travel to the meeting. If the ticket costs fulfil the eligibility conditions set out under Article 6 of the GA, they are eligible, even if the beneficiary did not travel and did not take part in the meeting.”

We believe that in this particular case, the events that have led to the cancellation of our planned meeting can be considered as force majeure. The suicide attack was clearly beyond the consortium’s control and was also unforeseeable (despite some countries (US, Australia) suggested its citizens beforehand not to travel to Istanbul). Airline tickets were bought but since the meeting was called off they had to be cancelled too (depends on the airline and the type of ticket various degrees of refunds were available). Hotel bookings were also revoked (tip: it’s worth booking accommodation with free cancellation policy, to spare yourself the extra hassle in such cases).

The meeting eventually has been rescheduled to take place in Madrid at a later date. All we hope is that history won’t repeat itself and Madrid remains to be incident-free.

Source of photo: The Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk)

Written by: Istvan Pari

Competitive bidding – The right timing for proposal development

Countdown to submission – this is what many project managers and proposal writers all over the globe are struggling with continuously. Regardless of the subject, the art of combining scientific excellence with administrative soundness to deliver a winning proposal for a collaborative project is a widely sought skill. There are numerous ways and methodologies to develop project proposals but the time limit set by the funding body is always a challenging and often hindering factor.

In this blog post, I will try to give you some insight based on our first-hand experiences on how to understand and cope with this always difficult-to-keep time limit.

Mirror your future project

Collaborative projects are great! The expertise amassed through such an exercise can be immense and project partners can tackle issues together they would never be able to tackle on their own. But before the actual project can take off, there is already a considerable amount of work to be invested in at the proposal stage. Although the efforts for developing a project proposal are most of the time not financially reimbursed by the actual fund, we should always remember that a proposal is something like a mirror of the entire project which is to follow. Carrying this analogy further, the ideal proposal presents the reader, mostly an evaluator, with a concise, complete and credible reflection of all those project activities which are not yet carried out but are planned. And this reflection tells him/her a great deal about how the project will be set in a timely pattern. Time management starting at the first day of the proposal development is therefore an essential skill for every project manager.

Two realities in time management

Time management in proposal development for collaborative projects is twofold: One part is foreseeable, while the other is unforeseeable. The foreseeable component represents the entire palette of tasks and activities which will be undertaken during the project. They could also be described as the hard facts of the project. A proposal writer should be able to get an overview of all those facts through an organised planning. This also means that the required time efforts can be estimated fairly well and matched with the set deadline for proposal submission. This all sounds comprehensible and achievable so far, but there is at the same time an unforeseeable component to time management.

The collaboration with a multitude of consortium partners, being it different departments in your company, or different institutions, brings in the desired added value in the form of different experts and expertises. And this is where the unforeseeable time factor comes in. As the collaboration partners will be involved in different areas, tasks and activities of the future project, the proposal ought to be composed of inputs from the partners. This will ensure to reflect the collaboration between the partners and how their expertise will be used inclusively in the project. In the role of the proposal writer, organising, collecting and formatting these partner inputs will take up a considerable amount of time which should be granted to every proposal development process. The required time for these partner communications can vary highly due to a number of factors which are out of the scope of this blog post.

Getting the right balance

Having understood that there is always a foreseeable and an unforeseeable component to time management in proposal development, the proposal writer can try to modify these two components. The goal would be to shift the unforeseeable component to a minimum, meaning to prescribe the input from partners as far as possible. This can be done by seeking a precise overview of the foreseeable component, the hard facts with all project activities and requirements, and guiding partners closely to provide the desired inputs. Taking the opposite scenario, it might happen that input from partners becomes overwhelming due to a lack of precise and delimited hard facts in a project and the proposal phase. This unwanted scenario would clearly lead to an overweight of the unforeseeable time component and would probably cause loss of quality.

Carrying these theoretical insights into practice can be quite challenging but it is very useful to remember the two realities and that they can influence each other mutually, either to the good or to the bad.

 By Daniel Frohnmaier

Source of the Figures:

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