Exergio: ‘EU’s five-year Climate Review overlooks fastest fix for buildings

VILNIUS, Lithuania, 8 October 2025: The European Environment Agency (EEA) released a five-year review of Europe’s climate progress, in which it highlighted how buildings still top Europe’s emissions and are responsible for 42% of energy use and 35% of CO₂ emissions.

Yet, energy industry stakeholders noted that the issue is that the prescribed solution to reduce emissions did not change from what it was five years ago. Instead of utilising novel technologies, the report suggests more renovation, insulation and boiler replacements while doubling down on renewables, Exergio, a company that develops AI-based tools for energy efficiency in commercial buildings, said. In the EU, 75% of buildings are still energy inefficient, Exergio said.

Since 85% of the stock that will stand in 2050 is already built, the cost and time needed for large-scale renovation run into decades and costs billions, it said, adding that this simply shows how Europe’s strategy lags behind reality.

“The EEA report comes once every five years, but some parts of it, unfortunately, feel stuck in the past,” said Donatas Karčiauskas, CEO, Exergio. “In recent years, AI has transformed how we manage cars, grids, medicine and many other industries. Yet when it comes to buildings, Europe’s most important climate review still talks only about insulation and boilers. The tools that in our practice could cut up to 30% of waste are invisible in this review.”

Independent reports confirm that just adding AI to buildings’ energy management systems could help them cut energy from eight per cent to 40%, yet the EEA’s review does not mention it once for buildings, Exergio pointed out.

However, while missing from the report, Karčiauskas said that AI retrofits are already used in commercial buildings. AI-based platforms, he added, link into existing energy management systems, track HVAC, heating, cooling and lighting in real time, and stop waste before it accumulates.

By ignoring these tools, EEA signals to policymakers that only physical renovations count, Karčiauskas said.

“The report is right to say buildings are Europe’s biggest problem,” Karčiauskas said. “But it fails to show how quickly we can act. Renovations are essential, but they are too slow to carry us to 2030’s goals. If AI is not even mentioned in the continent’s flagship review, then policymakers will continue to overlook the fastest lever we have.”

Elaborating on how these tools are used in practice, Exergio said usually, an AI-based platform pulls live data, pinpoints inefficiencies and adjusts operations automatically. It means that heating and cooling gets cut back in empty rooms, airflow is trimmed in real time and boilers only become staged when needed, Exergio said. This way, it added, building owners adopt them to save costs and cut emissions – two outcomes rarely achieved together with traditional retrofits.

“In some of our cases, we achieved millions of savings,” Karčiauskas said. “If policymakers recognised this in their climate plans, we would see lower CO₂ emissions and happier businesses before the next five-year review.”

Exergio warned that climate reporting must catch up with technology. The traditional path of renovations and insulation will still be necessary, but if energy systems do not operate intelligently, buildings will continue wasting energy. “If AI stays left out and forgotten from the agenda until the next review, in 2030, Karčiauskas said, Europe risks seeing the same numbers, the same gaps and another five-year cycle lost.”