The EU Digital Building Stock Model (DBSM) is designed to provide a comprehensive and detailed geospatial database of individual buildings within the European Union, focusing primarily on their energy-related characteristics. This new iteration of the geospatial dataset, DBSM R2025, offers significant enhancements over its predecessor, including more precise and detailed building polygons, as well as an expanded collection of building attributes and a complete EU-27 geographic coverage (including Azores, Madeira, and Canary islands). These attributes encompass a range of factors such as building height, compactness, epoch of construction, use type and rooftop solar photovoltaic potential. The technical report linked below provides an in-depth examination of the methodological approach employed in the development of these enhancements and discusses the validation processes undertaken to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the data. The scientific paper on Nature Energy (now in press), will provide a description of the methodology followed for the estimation of the rooftop photovoltaic metrics along with insights on the potential to cover EU electricity needs and policy targets.
Martinez, Ana M; Kakoulaki, Georgia; Florio, Pietro; Politis, Panagiotis; Gounari, Olympia (2026): DBSM R2025: EU Digital Building Stock Model update including satellite-based attributes and rooftop photovoltaics potential. European Commission, Joint Research Centre [Dataset] doi: 10.2905/JRC.D1NJ5GG; 10.2905/a601a4a8-9289-4fc4-983a-25d54f957f3a PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/a601a4a8-9289-4fc4-983a-25d54f957f3a
European Unionindividual buildingsrooftop photovoltaic potential
DBSM R2025 is distributed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL). The various licenses of the authoritative datasets incorporated from EUBUCCO are specified in https://api.eubucco.com/v0.1/files/cc5b1b47-e1fc-4887-8a26-d8878648c3df/download.
Buildings from MSB are considered as a third priority and included when they do not overlap with the EUB-OSM conflated dataset. The MSB height was only included as an attribute when the confidence level (provided by the data source) is higher than 90%. The height information is also retained. Dataset downloaded in May 2024.
Building footprints from EUBUCCO v0.1 have been incorporated as highest priority when a polygon is available from authoritative sources. In countries where both OSM and authoritative sources were combined in EUBUCCO v0.1, only polygons extracted from authoritative sources have been considered in the conflation process for DBSM v2DBSM R2025. Information on the height, age and type of the building is also retained within eub_json. Dataset downloaded in January 2023.
Buildings extracted from OpenStreetMap. The building tags kept from the numerous tags are: building, levels, roof-shape, height, and construction date. It has been accessed on April 2024 using the OGR2OGR GDAL tool.
