Policies and practices for an energy efficient European housing stock

Policies and practices for an energy efficient European housing stock

Visscher, H.J.

Architecture and The Built Environment

OTB

2015-12-31

The housing stock has a major energy saving potential and is mostly considered to be the sector in which energy efficiency most cost effectively could be achieved. 30% of all energy use is consumed in the housing stock. The European union has formulated targets for a reduction of CO2 emissions to be achieved by a combination of energy efficiency and use of renewable energy sources. To enable this policies and regulations have been formulated that have to be implemented by the member states. Also a large share of the EU budget for research and innovation is dedicated to this challenge. Many policies, investment programmes, technical innovations, process innovations have been developed and been put into practice. However, it appears to be very difficult to realise massive renovation programmes in the existing housing stock and really make a step forward towards the energy efficiency goals. The economic crises makes it more difficult to make large investments for housing associations and home owners. Moreover, it seems hard to achieve actual energy savings by improving the energy performance of housing. New housing seems to have problems with achieving the actual quality and the rebound effect in the behaviour of the occupants also has a undermining effect. In the existing stock occupants of bad insulated housing appear to use less energy than expected. Renovation improves the comfort and only leads to a limited energy use reduction. This paper presents an overview of insights of the perspective of energy efficiency in the housing stock based on several research projects from the Netherlands and other EU countries. It contains data of actual energy use, building quality, renovation progress rates and effectiveness of policies. Based on this a realistic perspective of what should and can be achieved will be sketched.

energy efficiency
housing stock
policies
actual energy use

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:48c2db4e-6130-44dd-8618-8da2413f70a8

Research Institute for Sustainable Urban Development & Faculty of Construction and Environment, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Proceedings of ICSU 2015, the Second International Conference on Sustainable Urbanization, Hong Kong, China, January 7-9, 2015; Authors version

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2015 Visscher H.J.