Directive (EU) 2024/1275, commonly referred to as the EPBD 2024 or the recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, entered into force on 28 May 2024 following publication in the Official Journal of the European Union on 8 May 2024 (reference DOUE-L-2024-80664), according to EUR-Lex. The directive consolidates and repeals its predecessors, Directive 2010/31/EU and its 2018 amendments, establishing a unified legislative framework with the overarching objective of achieving a fully decarbonised EU building stock by 2050. Member States are required to complete transposition into national law by 29 May 2026, and according to the European Commission Directorate for Energy, failure to do so exposes Member States to infringement proceedings. | The scope of the directive is broad, covering energy performance certification, renovation passports, solar energy integration, smart readiness indicators (SRI), and whole-life carbon assessment through life cycle analysis (LCA). For engineering teams operating across EU jurisdictions, including Spain, Germany, France, and the Netherlands, the directive creates a set of simultaneous, interlocking compliance obligations with distinct technical requirements at each stage. Understanding the sequencing of those obligations is a prerequisite for sound project planning on any building that will be procured, transacted, or substantially renovated before 2030. | In Spain, the directive must be integrated with existing national instruments: the Codigo Tecnico de la Edificacion (CTE), the Reglamento de Instalaciones Termicas en los Edificios (RITE), and the energy certification framework established under Real Decreto 390/2021. According to MITECO, the Spanish institutional platform for building energy efficiency confirms that some measures in the directive were already aligned with existing Spanish regulations, whilst other obligations, particularly those relating to renovation passports and life cycle analysis, require additional regulatory development. This partial alignment has practical consequences. According to BUILD UP, the European Commission platform for building energy efficiency, Spain had achieved approximately 60 per cent adaptation towards the May 2026 transposition deadline. That figure means a significant share of the technical and administrative obligations derived from the directive still required specific regulatory development or updating of existing national instruments at the time of assessment. | One of the most immediate changes concerns energy performance certificates (EPCs). According to BUILD UP, from 29 May 2026, certificates must mandatorily use the A-to-G scale and the template model defined in Annex V of the directive. This harmonised format serves two purposes: it facilitates comparability of building assets across the EU, and it provides more actionable information on recommended improvement measures. Spain's Real Decreto 390/2021 already introduced the A-to-G scale, but Directive (EU) 2024/1275 adds further content requirements, including information on embodied global warming potential, the smart readiness indicator, and integration with the renovation passport. These additional requirements necessitate updates to the inspection, calculation, and registration procedures currently administered by Spain's autonomous communities, which hold competence over certification registers. Certificates issued prior to May 2026 may require review if they do not conform to the Annex V format, particularly where they are used in property transactions occurring after that date. For asset-intensive sectors such as hospital and healthcare engineering or education estates, where buildings are frequently large consumers with complex HVAC systems, accurate modelling of the updated EPC indicators is critical for meeting deadlines and avoiding administrative penalties. | The renovation passport is one of the most substantive innovations introduced by EPBD 2024. According to MITECO, the directive requires Member States to establish a renovation passport scheme based on Annex VIII of the directive, with a deadline of 29 May 2026. Unlike a standard EPC, which provides a snapshot of a building's current energy status, a renovation passport is a structured, personalised document describing a staged deep renovation roadmap for a specific building, with the objective of reaching the highest possible energy efficiency level, ideally nearly zero-energy building (NZEB) standard or better. Each stage in the roadmap carries estimated energy savings, approximate costs, and a temporal priority ranking. The strategic value of the passport lies in its capacity to phase investment, minimising the risk of stranded assets and maximising alignment with funding mechanisms such as the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility. From a methodological standpoint, producing a technically rigorous renovation passport requires a detailed energy model of the existing building, scenario analysis of improvement options, estimation of embodied and operational carbon emissions, and coordination with regional certification registers. Digital twin engineering tools enable construction of that baseline model using real building data, supporting comparative simulations across different renovation routes before any capital commitment is made. | On solar energy integration, the EPBD 2024 establishes binding obligations for new construction. According to MITECO, in the Spanish implementation guidance for the directive, all new public and non-residential buildings with a usable floor area exceeding 250 square metres must have solar installations in place before 31 December 2026, where technically and economically feasible. This obligation is progressively extended to other building categories in subsequent phases. The requirement overlaps with provisions already contained in the CTE DB HE (Basic Document on Energy Saving), which in its 2019 revision introduced minimum solar contribution requirements. The EPBD 2024 raises that threshold and makes it binding under tighter timescales, treating solar energy as default infrastructure rather than an optional measure. New-build projects with more than 250 square metres in public or non-residential use must assess the technical and economic feasibility of solar installation from the concept design stage, with documented justification for any claimed exemption. | The compliance calendar does not conclude in May 2026. According to BUILD UP, the first binding life cycle assessment (LCA) requirements will begin to apply to large buildings from 2028, extending to all new buildings by 2030. In the context of EPBD 2024, LCA measures the global warming potential across the full building life cycle, encompassing construction materials, the operational phase, and demolition, expressed in kilograms of CO2 equivalent per square metre per year. Projects currently in design for large floor areas must therefore incorporate LCA methodologies into their technical documentation now, in order to be compliant when those requirements come into force. Integration of LCA within BIM models, following information management protocols such as those described in ISO 19650, provides the most efficient route to ensuring that documentation remains coherent, traceable, and updatable throughout the asset's life. This is particularly relevant for industrial and manufacturing facilities, where buildings combine high technical loading with floor areas that frequently exceed the thresholds associated with the most demanding obligations. Additionally, according to the European Commission Directorate for Energy, Member States must submit their final national building renovation plans by 31 December 2026. Those plans must quantify the existing building stock, decade-by-decade renovation targets, and associated financing measures, providing the priority framework against which national and European funding calls will be structured. | The resulting regulatory landscape, combining EPBD 2024 with the CTE, the RITE, and energy audit obligations under Real Decreto 56/2016 (which transposes Directive 2012/27/EU on energy efficiency and requires large undertakings to conduct audits every four years), creates a complex compliance environment with multiple active deadlines running concurrently. Engineering teams working across EU Member States should note several practical implications. Building owners with renovation plans should evaluate whether requesting a renovation passport is preferable to undertaking isolated improvement works, given that the passport may become a prerequisite for access to certain public financing streams. New-build projects must embed LCA procedures in existing workflows to be prepared for the 2028 requirements. Energy audits conducted under existing national transpositions of the energy efficiency directive must be made coherent with the new EPBD 2024 indicators, in particular the global warming potential and the smart readiness indicator. Across all building typologies, structured information management from the earliest project stages remains the most reliable mechanism for maintaining compliance with a regulatory framework whose technical content will continue to evolve between now and 2030.