The building sector is Italy’s third largest emitting sector, accounting for 19% of the country’s total emissions in 2019. Building sector energy intensity has decreased by 35% over the 1990-2019 period but emissions do not show a sustained decline (2019 levels are close to the 1990s’).
In 2019, energy supply to the building sector was mostly coming from gas (around 50%), followed by electricity (itself greatly relying on gas, see ‘Power’ section) and biomass. The most ambitious 1.5°C scenarios see rapidly decrease emissions and fossil gas consumption in buildings, leading to full decarbonisation by 2036, mainly through electrification and biomass substitution. Across all pathways, direct CO₂ emissions in the buildings sector are roughly halved from 2019 levels by 2030, with a reduction of 48-54% by 2030.
Full decarbonisation of the sector could be driven by a high degree of electrification, reaching a share of final energy of roughly 50% by 2030 (almost doubling the 2019 electrification rate of 28%).
A high level of energy efficiency is the prerequisite for an electrification of the building sector. Italy’s national policy on building renovation that aims to meet the minimum requirement set out by the EU’s Energy Efficiency Directive, a 3% annual renovation rate of total floor area, would take 30 years to renovate the current stock. It is therefore critical to accelerate the targeted renovation rate, and to make sure that construction and efficiency standards are consistent with the 2050 EU net zero goal.16
26 Electric or hybrid vehicles with off-vehicle charging, powered by methane and hydrogen, and electricity and methane in the case of buses.
27 While global cost-effective pathways assessed by the IPCC Special Report 1.5°C provide useful guidance for an upper-limit of emissions trajectories for developed countries, they underestimate the feasible space for such countries to reach net zero earlier. The current generation of models tend to depend strongly on land-use sinks outside of currently developed countries and include fossil fuel use well beyond the time at which these could be phased out, compared to what is understood from bottom-up approaches. The scientific teams which provide these global pathways constantly improve the technologies represented in their models – and novel CDR technologies are now being included in new studies focused on deep mitigation scenarios meeting the Paris Agreement. A wide assessment database of these new scenarios is not yet available, thus we rely on available scenarios which focus particularly on BECCS as a net-negative emission technology. Accordingly, we do not yet consider land-sector emissions (LULUCF) and other CDR approaches which developed countries will need to implement in order to counterbalance their remaining emissions and reach net zero GHG are not considered here due to data availability.