Historic centres are special parts of the urban fabric that must be kept alive, to avoid depopulation and gentrification. The energy renovation of its buildings is key to achieve a balance between the conservation of built heritage and the sustainability required to meet the needs of citizens, in terms of thermal comfort and energy efficiency. We argue that adopting a holistic approach at a neighbourhood scale, instead of the traditional individual building scale, will boost the large-scale energy renovation, due to economies of scale on energy savings and investment cost. Within our approach it was designed and implemented a geospatial-based index - Urban Energy Renovation (UER) - integrating socio-economic variables of households, buildingsi characteristics and energy savings potential, with the purpose of benchmarking the capacity and opportunity for energy renovation in historic centres. The UER index was applied to ten historic centres in Portugal to compare energy savings potential, localize priority areas of intervention and identify contiguous areas with similar potential. We concluded that this spatial-based methodology contributes to boost large-scale energy buildings renovation in historic centres, which is key to attract new dwellers. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.