The efficiency of the incentives for the public buildings’ energy retrofit. The case of the Italian Regions of the “Objective Convergence”

The objective of energy use and emissions reduc-tions, enunciated in many European Directives, has emphasized the need to promote the improvement of energy efficiency of existing buildings.Local administrations, in particular, should submit their own buildings to energy retrofit, not only to re-spect the Directives, but also to make those build-ings an example of an active environmental culture and to induce similar improvement in private build-ings, on the basis of financial appraisal of feasibility, which can be facilitated by incentives.The “Unione Province di Italia” (UPI) in 2013, within the POI Energy (Interregional Operative Program), requested energy audits and projects of the energy retrofit for 150 public buildings located in the 4 Italian Regions of the "Objective Convergence" (Campania, Puglia, Calabria and Sicily). In this study, a methodological proposal is elaborat-ed, including a Cash Flow Analysis and an analysis of risk and uncertainty through the Monte Carlo method, to appraise the cost-effectiveness of retrofit actions in public buildings. The methodology is ap-plied to a sample of 36 actions, and it allows getting some economic-financial indicators (Net Present Value NPV and Payback Period) able to support the public decision process for selecting the best alter-natives to be realized. The evaluation model is direct to search those conditions that assure the profitabil-ity and to know how much the currently available in-centives are a practical financial tool (not-refundable incentives of the Conto Termico 2.0, DM 16/02/2016).The financial analysis is integrated with a risk analy-sis, which evaluates the sensibility of the results to the inputs of the model. The results of the study show that: a category of actions never get the finan-cial profitability; some actions have a positive NPV but a quite long Payback Period (higher than 15 years) only with the adequate incentives; finally, a category of actions has a positive NPV and short Payback Period (lower than 16 years) and are even profitable under low favorable market conditions. This last category could be particularly attractive for the Public Administration that intends to make ac-tions that reach energy saving and economic-financial profitability.