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EPBD: a quiet obligation for thousands of buildings
The EPBD directive will touch almost every participant in the property market — and surprisingly few people know its content. Here are the four pillars of a regulation worth preparing for before national implementing legislation arrives.
Four pillars, four challenges
Directive 2024/1275 rests on four pillars — which are at the same time four challenges for owners and managers of buildings. The implementing legislation will arrive eventually, and the provisions will cover practically everyone who manages a building.
1. New buildings
From 2028, public buildings, and from 2030, all new buildings, will have to meet the zero-emission ZEB standard — in simple terms: very low energy demand and no emissions from fossil fuels.
2. Existing buildings
In the non-residential segment, 16% of the worst-performing buildings will require renovation by 2030, and 26% in total by 2033. In housing, average primary energy consumption is to fall by 16% by 2030 and by 20–22% by 2035, mainly through improvements to the weakest buildings.
3. Systems
Rooftop solar on new commercial and public buildings according to a 2026–2030 schedule, an end to public support for fossil fuel boilers, and a pathway to phasing them out by 2040.
4. Building automation — the most interesting pillar
From my perspective, this is where the change will run deepest, because it can reach thousands of buildings already in operation.
The threshold above which non-residential buildings must have BACS (Building Automation & Control Systems) drops from 290 kW to 70 kW of heating or air conditioning system output. Deadline: the end of 2029. In practice, that means many mid-sized retail, office, service and industrial buildings that have so far stayed outside any such obligation.
Importantly, the directive does not simply say "you must have automation". The BACS has to deliver specific functions: continuous monitoring, recording and analysis of energy consumption, the ability to correct how the installation runs, benchmarking of the building's efficiency, detection of losses in the efficiency of technical systems, and informing the person responsible for the building. On top of that comes communication between technical systems, regardless of technology and manufacturer. New and substantially renovated non-residential buildings will additionally have to monitor indoor air quality. There is an incentive too: buildings equipped with BACS compliant with the directive will be exempt from periodic inspections of heating and air conditioning.
Many BMS installations may not be enough
This means that many current BMS installations may not meet the requirements — even if they are new, working and look good on screen. What will be verified are functions, integration, monitoring, analysis and the ability to genuinely improve how the building runs. An old saying applies here: if you want to buy well and cheaply, sometimes you have to buy twice.
National implementing legislation may shift the emphasis, but it will not change the direction. EPBD moves the market from "owning automation" to actually managing the building — with the emphasis on its energy.
EPBD moves the market from "owning automation" to actually managing the building — with the emphasis on its energy.
The functions the directive requires of BACS — continuous measurement, analysis for optimisation, benchmarking of sites, automatic fault detection and real correction of how the installation runs — are exactly what Percee does as an EMOS-class layer. It sits on top of the existing BMS, meters and automation from any manufacturer, so it closes the BACS requirement without replacing working equipment and without dependence on a single supplier. The same mechanism that satisfies the obligation lowers the cost of energy at the same time — by 15–40% at Solwena's customers, across more than 50 deployments and over 3,000 sites under management.
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