Jak spełnić EPBD, ISO i ESG

Most BMS installations will not meet the EPBD requirements for BACS — and it is not about their age

Edwin Dudziak

8/5/2026

Directive 2024/1275 demands considerably more from BACS than most building managers assume. The difference between "we have automation" and "we have automation compliant with the directive" turns out in practice to be enormous.

It is not about whether you have automation

Let us start with scope. The directive does not ask whether the building has an automation system — it asks whether the BACS controls at least 80% of the rated (thermal) output of air conditioning and 80% of the electrical power of ventilation, covering both central plant and terminal units.

In many facilities, the air handling unit sits in the BMS while the terminal units in the zones lead lives of their own — and the 80% threshold suddenly stops adding up. The directive also expects the ability to change HVAC setpoints and to optimise across interconnected systems, rather than merely controlling each one separately. And it has to happen automatically.

Measurement and analysis: the data has to do something

The second area is measurement and analysis — and here it is not enough that a meter is hanging somewhere. Meter data has to reach the BACS at hourly resolution or better and be analysed for possible energy optimisation. HVAC consumption has to be recorded at least once a day and compared against a reference point — another installation in the same building, or the same building in a previous period. Process data, for example the deviation from a heat pump's design COP, has to be analysed against defined baselines.

Most BMS installations display this data on a screen — but few of them do anything with it on their own.

Automatic fault detection

The third area is automatic detection. The directive, following the EN ISO 52120 standard, expects automatic detection of HVAC equipment faults, investigation of losses in technical efficiency and identification of equipment running in manual override — all recorded centrally, with diagnostics leading to corrective action where deviations recur.

A manual bypass left by a service engineer three months ago is a classic that an ordinary BMS does not see.

Informing the operating staff

The fourth area concerns the people who run the building. The BACS has to inform the responsible person reliably and quickly about energy waste and loss of comfort — not only that something is failing, but where and how to respond, faults in central plant included. In new and renovated buildings, air quality monitoring across at least 80% of the floor area is added: temperature, humidity and CO2 as an indicator of air quality, recorded at least hourly.

From owning automation to managing the building

In our projects, we see a repeatable pattern: the system works, looks good on screen and measures a great many things, and still fails to deliver a significant part of the functions the directive treats as mandatory.

EPBD shifts the burden from owning automation to actually and automatically managing a building's energy — and those are two radically different things. For building managers, that means one thing: it is worth checking your own facilities against the specific BACS functions today, before the statutory deadline does it for you.

EPBD shifts the burden from owning automation to actually and automatically managing a building's energy — and those are two radically different things.

Jak to rozwiązujemy

Percee closes the gap between an ordinary BMS and the BACS requirements without replacing a working system. As an EMOS-class layer it collects data from meters and automation from any manufacturer, analyses it for optimisation, benchmarks sites against each other, automatically catches anomalies and manual overrides, and genuinely controls the installation — which is to say, it does what the directive requires and what most BMS installations lack. It works as a supervisory, hardware-agnostic layer, so it does not mean buying automation twice.