Building renovation Passport: A new methodology for scheduling and addressing financial challenges for low-income households

EU Directive 2024/1275 introduced the Building Renovation Passport (BRP) as a voluntary scheme that building owners can adopt to plan energy renovations. A common framework for drafting the BRP has been established. However, a systematic methodology enabling issuers or energy auditors to effectively schedule interventions over time from a financial perspective has yet to be established. This paper develops a new method to support the scheduling of energy renovation measures as required by the BRP. The procedure is designed to be universally applicable and is based on the evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of investments. This strategy, which also considers the owner's financial situation, enables effective planning tailored to their needs. Through calculating NPV and considering the household's economic availability and the investment's payback time, renovation interventions that allow achieving the nearly Zero Energy Building target are planned in subsequent steps. The aim of the study is to provide, for the first time, a guiding method for compiling the BRP while also making it accessible to households in conditions of energy poverty. The method is applied to a case study in Portugal to prove its applicability. Different scenarios are analyzed, and a parametric analysis is conducted to extend the method's applicability to different apartment types, climate zones, household composition, and government incentive options. The results show that effective renovation scheduling is achievable through the proposed methodology, allowing to take the family out of energy poverty and reduce building emissions. In addition, the provision of aid from the state facilitates the implementation of interventions and makes it possible to reduce the time to complete the building renovation.