Current climate change threats and increasing CO₂ emissions, especially from the building stock, represent a context where action is required. It is necessary to provide efficient manners to manage energy demand in buildings and contribute to a decarbonised future. By combining new technologies, such as artificial intelligence, Internet of things, blockchain, and the exploitation of big data towards solving real life problems, the way could be paved towards smart and energy-aware buildings. In this context, the aim of this paper is to present a critical review and an in-detail definition of the big data value chain for the built environment in Europe, covering multiple needs and perspectives: “policy”, “technology” and “business”, in order to explore the main challenges and opportunities in this area.

The MAtchUP project (Maximizing the Upscaling and replication potential of high level urban transformation strategies) developed an urban transformation methodology for sustainable city planning, based on demand-side and supply-side characterisations. The supply-side characterisation is based on the Smart City Technology Packages (SCTP), which are groups of solutions from those demonstrated in the Lighthouse cities of the Project, selected based on their replication potential and with the aim to maximise the impact of MAtchUP actions. The SCTPs are organised in the three main pillars of energy, mobility and ICT (information and communication technologies), and its characterisation includes three main fields: a general description (including reasons for implementing the technologies, barriers and benefits), operational model (analysing business models’ archetype, cost structure and financial model), and impact assessment (in the fields of environment, economy and social). Such characterisation is done under common criteria, which allows comparisons among SCTPs. The supply-side methodology included also a PESTEL (political, economic, social, technological, environmental, legal) analysis done by each city in order to evaluate the viability of each SCTP under those circumstances of the city, to finally obtain the most suitable set of solutions to implement.

The detailed knowledge of the building stock status has a direct influence in the building renovation's policies and strategies, and comprehensive and reliable data on it is key to address this need to achieve a better energy performance of buildings in Europe, as they are responsible of 40% for energy consumption and for 36% of greenhouse gas emissions. This paper aims at providing an overview of the BuiltHub project and how it is dealing with the EU building stock data, structuring different available datasets at EU level and across different countries to build a user-friendly platform where data is available in different indicators organised in key thematic areas of building stock knowledge.