The Ministry of Housing and Utilities of Ukraine decided to test in practice the efficiency of some provisions of the new law while developing the draft Law of Ukraine "On Buildings Energy Efficiency" and joined the central and local authorities using the open demonstration scheme for the energy certification of buildings developed within the scope of the European Display, a voluntary information dissemination campaign.

The Display energy certification system and the relevant tools were developed in 2003 with the involvement of experts from 18 countries of Europe and the financial support provided by the European Commission. The Display board displays and assesses the relative indicators of the overall energy consumption and the related carbon dioxide emissions, as well as the water consumption by 11 major building types in an appropriate scale. It was found out that the building of the Housing and Utilities Ministry is categorised as F class in terms of the energy consumption, which is substantially lower than the average European level of C to D; the building was ranked lowest at G level in terms of the water consumption. One can realise even without the specialist technical knowledge that the building has substantial unutilised energy efficiency potential. This is actually the idea behind the relevant provision of the law requiring that the energy displays be demonstrated to the public. This is bound to encourage activities of building owners and users toward the improvement of the energy performance of buildings and creates pre-requisites for the objective assessment of the efficiency of the efforts applied.

According to the ministry, the production of energy certificates (passports) for buildings and the presentation of the integrated energy resource consumption therein is one of the key provisions of the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive adopted in 2002. "The year 2008 became the starting point for changes toward a better situation in the building of the Housing and Utilities Ministry: having started with the replacement of windows, the thermal insulation of outer walls, the installation of radiator temperature regulators and the development of the energy conservation conduct among employees of the ministry, we managed to reduce the building's energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of the building substantially within one year. This permitted to move the relative energy resource consumption indicator from Class G to Class F. Of course, this is not ideal, and we are going to implement other energy conservation measures in the course of several years to advance much further", the spokesman of the ministry stated. The 2009 list of the energy efficiency improvement measures includes the comprehensive thermal insulation of fencing structures and the installation of the weather-regulated building heating station, which will make it possible for the building to save more than 50% of the consumed thermal energy.

The Association of Local Self-government Bodies "Energy Efficient Cities of Ukraine" is promoting the idea of the implementation of building energy certificates in Ukraine for the purposes of the monitoring of efforts of local authorities focused on improving the energy efficiency of municipal facilities. Some cities, which are members of the Associations, already had a chance to convince themselves of the efficiency of display boards as an assessment and information tool: these are Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv, Lutsk, Kamyanets-Podilsky, Dolyna, Kovel. The broad popularity of such certificates is expected to intensify the process of the implementation of energy conservation measures in municipal buildings and houses.

Knauf Insulation company, which has been co-operating with participants of the Display campaign in the European Union since long ago, supported the joint initiative of the Housing and Utilities Ministry and the "Energy Efficient Cities of Ukraine" Association to provide buildings of central authorities of Ukraine with Display energy certificates. According to Andriy Pavlyk, Director of Knauf Insulation Ukraine, "it is extremely important in the current extremely complicated economic and energy situation in Ukraine for the idea of the energy certification of buildings to prove its constructive nature and feasibility in practice. This will substantially simplify and accelerate the adoption of the Law of Ukraine "On Buildings Energy Efficiency". It is not possible to efficiently tackle tasks of the comprehensive energy modernisation of buildings and the assurance of the energy security of the state.