Energy retrofit of Sardinian land reform rural settlements

The ELIH-MED strategic project, co-financed under the MED Programme by EU, was focused on energy efficiency in low income housing (LIH) in the Mediterranean area and on the involvement of residents in energy retrofit, in order to reach EU2020 objectives. Within the project several pilot actions were realized, one of them the experimental retrofit of Sardinian rural buildings carried out by the local partner, the regional agency LAORE, with the scientific support of the Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture Department of the University of Cagliari. The pilot actions were carried out on thirty buildings located in northern Sardinia, built in the 1950s during the land reform. The paper hereby presented deals with the results of the project activities and their extension to all the land reform settlements. A preliminary historical analysis on construction technologies and materials is carried out using the original projects and specifications. An in-situ survey on energy performance of constructive components and building energy consumptions is then presented. The results are used to define the overall retrofit strategies and technologies, both on the envelope and the systems. They are shown not only for the ELIH-MED pilot project, but also for the entire LAORE building stock. Specific attention is given to the integration of renewable energies, in particular solar and biomass that, due to the rural context, can bring those buildings very close to the "nearly zero energy" standard.