The publication of the final report of the Demeter project opens up new perspectives for the energy transition of the tertiary sector.

Winner of the ADEME call for projects "Towards responsible buildings" (2022), this program, led by the Scientific and Technical Center for Building (CSTB), in partnership with the Sustainable Real Estate Observatory (OID), Efficacity, Orange and Arcora, represents a major step forward in improving knowledge and energy management of the French tertiary sector.

A key national issue

Representing over one billion square meters and nearly 15% of national energy consumption[1], the commercial building sector is a key driver of the environmental transition. Yet, knowledge of it remains fragmented, heterogeneous, and insufficiently structured.

DEMETER addresses this need by analyzing available data, actual building uses and existing modeling methods, in order to offer a more detailed, reliable and operational view of the commercial building stock.

In-depth research to better understand the commercial building sector

The work focused on five key areas: assessment of existing national data sources, analysis of the level of knowledge of stakeholders about their own building(s), material characterization of the tertiary stock, adaptation of energy simulation to typological approaches and exploration of mobility data (telephony) to measure the actual occupancy of buildings.

These analyses revealed several obstacles: incomplete inventory (granularity, exhaustiveness and methodological transparency), difficulty in identifying the actual uses of tertiary buildings (particularly due to mixed use), dispersion of technical memory or limitations of access to certain expert data which complicate their use.

Unprecedented and transformative results

DEMETER has enabled the production of various deliverables representing major advances:

• An unprecedented analysis of material data from 3.000 buildings representing 25 million m2, thanks to the R4RE ​​platform of the Sustainable Real Estate Observatory (OID)[2], allowing for a better understanding of the materials, systems and energies used.
• A typological segmentation of the office stock designed by Arcora, facilitating the estimation of thermal performance and the construction of large-scale renovation scenarios.
• An innovative energy simulation methodology developed by Efficacity, combining sensitivity analysis and Bayesian calibration to improve the reliability of models despite incomplete input data.
• An analysis of actual occupancy carried out by CSTB and Orange, demonstrating the potential of mobile phone data to refine building occupancy profiles and enrich energy models.

Key recommendations for the sector

The final report calls for strengthening and optimizing the national inventory, improving usage categorization, leveraging regulatory data in secure frameworks, and structuring the technical memory of the fleet.

The whole thing converges towards a central need: a national infrastructure capable of aggregating and interoperating data, a role perfectly suited to the CSTB's National Building Database (BDNB), in its capacity as an aggregator of national databases.

A common foundation to accelerate the transition of the service sector

By harmonizing methods, consolidating data and formulating recommendations that open up new perspectives for analysis, DEMETER offers a robust methodological foundation to accelerate support for tertiary sector actors in achieving national energy transition objectives.

Access the report and deliverables on the ADEME online bookstore

[1] Key figures from the ADEME's BâtiZoom observatory https://batizoom.ademe.fr/chiffres-cles-introduction

[2] R4RE ​​is the platform developed by the Sustainable Real Estate Observatory (OID) for analyzing the resilience of buildings and territories. It includes a module for analyzing climate risks and a module for analyzing biodiversity issues. Since March 2024, Bat-ADADPT Territoires has complemented these tools and offers a climate analysis module for local authorities.