European Union Funding to Boost Passive Building Protection
The EU Next Generation programme, funded by the European Union, includes €140,000 million for Spain until 2026. A good chunk of this will be for rehabilitating and improving buildings to increase energy efficiency. TECNIFUEGO coordinator Alfonso Díez says that these grants can also be used to implement fire protection improvements.
Alfonso Díez is the coordinator of the Passive Protection Manufacturers Committee of TECNIFUEGO (Spanish Association of Fire Protection Companies). He explains that rehabilitation grants can also be used to implement fire protection improvements in buildings.
He proposes “to take into account and improve the fire protection characteristics of buildings undergoing rehabilitation.” He points out that “for this purpose, fire protection audits, FPAs, could be done alongside any energy efficiency rehabilitation project, and acted on accordingly to improve fire safety with passive and active measures.”
Recommendations
In short, and although they are outside the scope of these grants, TECNIFUEGO recommends implementing measures such as the following: “audits of the current building stock, qualification of fire engineering technical experts, and requiring checks for compliance with the CTE-DBSI building code.”
Díez emphasises that “recent building fires (particularly at heights) have shown that there are buildings whose construction doesn’t comply with the requirements of the Technical Building Code, CTE-DBSI of 2006, putting people and property at risk, and now is the time to resolve that.” In his opinion, “there’s an extraordinary opportunity to solve these safety shortcomings, through rehabilitation grant plans, which are already being implemented.”