Employment impacts from retrofitting Poland’s buildings

Central European University in Budapest has just published Employment Impacts of a Large-Scale Deep Building Energy Retrofit Programme in Poland.  The report was funded by the European Climate Foundation.

The research demonstrates that up to 84% of energy used to heat Polish buildings, and corresponding CO 2 emissions – can be avoided by a wide-spread “deep retrofit” programme. The research also highlights the risk of implementing less ambitious renovation programmes. If the purpose of refurbishments is keeping today’s shallow energy efficiency targets or are improved to just suboptimal level (i.e., reducing 50% of present energy use), this results in a significant lock-in effect. This means that if the renovation programme “cherry picks” by harvesting only the lowest hanging fruit (i.e., it implements only those measures with the shortest payback period, like replacing windows or partially improving building insulation), Poland’s ability to meet long-term, emission reduction targets (e.g., 50 to 85% of the year 2000 global carbon emissions by 2050, as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) will be jeopardised. Since heating-related emissions are difficult to mitigate other than by addressing them in buildings themselves, when a building has already undergone a renovation it is difficult and inefficient to implement yet another retrofit to capture the remaining, non-captured energy saving potential.

A basic assumption of this study is employment impacts strongly correlate with the dynamics of investments flows in building energy retrofits. Therefore the study has investigated the impact of specific renovation scenarios characterized by two factors: 1) the type or depth of retrofits and 2) the speed or implementation rate assumed.

For a copy of the report got to the CEU website.