At the ExPEDite General Assembly in Padova in March 2026, the UNIPD-CRIEP team presented the latest advances of Task 4.6, Economic Impact Assessment Toolbox, showing how the project’s cost-benefit analysis (CBA) framework is evolving from a methodological proposal into an operational, reusable tool.

The framework addresses a structural challenge that any city faces when planning district-scale energy renovation: the benefits most visible to society (cleaner air, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, improved public health) are not the same as the returns a private investor can capture. Without a rigorous way to measure and compare these two perspectives, investment decisions rest on incomplete information. The ExPEDite framework, grounded in the latest EU regulatory guidance (Regulation 2025/2273) and the CE Delft 2024 Environmental Prices Handbook, provides a shared methodology for doing exactly this: distinguishing private financial returns from broader social value and quantifying the conditions under which renovation interventions become viable from each perspective.

A key insight explored in the Padova presentation is that the timing of investment matters as much as its scale. The same package of measures deployed under different temporal profiles (for instance, concentrated upfront versus phased over several years) can produce substantially different economic outcomes over a 25-year horizon, even when the total expenditure is identical. The framework makes this sensitivity visible and testable. This is particularly relevant for the 2050 exploratory scenarios that the ExPEDite simulation suite is progressively building toward, which offer the most analytically coherent horizon for a long-run CBA.

On a final note, the application to the Kīpsala pilot in Riga is actively under development as simulation data from the Digital Twin mature. As such, current results are to be considered preliminary and, hence, should be read as a first operational test of the framework under real data constraints, not as final performance assessments of the pilot.

Try the toolkit with your own city data

One concrete output that will be available from Task 4.6 is the ExPEDite CBA replication package: an open-source Python toolkit accompanied by a structured spreadsheet template. Cities and practitioners do not need to rebuild the analytical pipeline from scratch: the toolkit is designed to be adapted by substituting local scenario data into the provided input format.

With the toolkit, a city team can:

• Run a social and financial CBA computation test applying EU-standard shadow prices for CO₂, PM₂.₅, NOₓ, and other pollutants
• Test sensitivity and uncertainty through built-in Monte Carlo analysis
• Estimate the flexibility revenue, or public support level, needed to close the financial viability gap for any given scenario

The package will be documented in Deliverable D4.4 (which will be available here by July) and comes with step-by-step guidance for adaptation. A synthetic demonstration dataset will be included so that the full workflow can be explored before any real pilot data are available.