Ecoforest will be part of the PROBONO Project

Ecoforest wins a new Horizon 2020 project in tough competition!

The PROBONO project (The centric approach for realising innovative energy efficient buildings in connected sustainable green neighbourhoods) was selected among 115 project proposals for the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme call LC-GD-4-1-2020: Building and renovating in an energy and resource efficient way. Now the project is officially started!

The ambition for sustainable and green buildings across Europe has encountered a number of barriers (e.g., as related to high upfront construction costs, access to capital, social attitudes, lack of information, experience and incentives). To answer the challenges related to the green building market, the Horizon 2020 PROBONO project envisions a people-focused European construction industry working in harmony with the broader community of stakeholders. Here, public authorities and citizens are involved with the purpose to deliver scalable, sustainable, and viable energy positive and zero-carbon green buildings and neighbourhoods.

The project’s ambition is to provide validated solutions for the design, construction, and operation of new and/or retrofitted zero-pollution and positive energy buildings as part of sustainable green neighbourhood developments. The type of neighbourhoods will be piloted across six EU states where the PROBONO living labs will be established.

The living labs will be linked to business and municipality greening plans. More specifically, the six PROBONO living labs will include two municipality driven large-scale demonstrators (Madrid and Dublin) and four living labs representing business/owner promoters of the green buildings and neighbourhoods’ transition (Porto, Brussels, Aarhus, Prague).

To achieve its goal, PROBONO will provide five transition acceleration enablers, as related to:

• strategic planning
• social engagement and innovation support
• green energy
• construction and renovation
• digitalisation for data-driven investment process and resource optimisation

Integratively utilizing on those enablers and deploying them across six high impact and people-focused real-life large-scale living labs, PROBONO will show how technological and social innovations related to green buildings and neighbourhoods can be applied.

Having a systems-based approach to the buildings’ infrastructure and a renewed focus on people and sustainability, the project will fully exploit digitalisation and smart technologies for the benefit of society. Finally, to enhance wide-scale adoption and standard creation, PROBONO will contribute with evidence-based policy recommendations, standardisation actions, and robust adoption and commercialisation strategies.

Supply of heat pump equipment

Ecoforest main role in this project is to provide the products and technology (heat pumps) to meet all the thermal demands of the project (heating, cooling, DHW, pool heating, etc.) and even the technology to uniquely hybridise (patented technology) the heat pumps with photovoltaic installations, to approach the Zero Energy Building concept.

The ambition of Ecoforest, as a manufacturer of renewable HVAC systems, within the PROBONO project is collaborate and help in the process of change towards a more ecological and environmentally responsible place. Also making available to the project its technical office, products and technology (heat pumps) to meet all the thermal demands of the project. Achieving, with the incorporation of these more efficient technologies, a greater compromise with the environment by reducing CO2 emissions into the atmosphere and taking advantage of the energy that the planet provides to us.

The project involved 47 partners from 15 different countries, for a 5-years project duration (2021-2026). Its total budget is EUR 25,252,011 and will receive a funding from the EU of EUR 20,158,449.

This project receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under Grant Agreement No 101037075.