Question of the week – is the lock in effect a major policy concern?

It would be good to get readers’ views on the “lock in effect” related to the renovation of buildings.

The EU’s Energy Efficiency Directive from 2012 requires member states to prepare long-term renovation strategies. In the recital to the Directive it states:

Bearing in mind that the Council conclusions of 10 June 2011 on the Energy Efficiency Plan 2011 stressed that buildings represent 40 % of the Union’s final energy consumption, and in order to capture the growth and employment opportunities in the skilled trades and construction sectors, as well as in the production of construction products and in professional activities such as architecture, consultancy and engineering, Member States should establish a long-term strategy beyond 2020 for mobilising investment in the renovation of residential and commercial buildings with a view to improving the energy performance of the building stock. That strategy should address cost-effective deep renovations which lead to a refurbishment that reduces both the delivered and the final energy consumption of a building by a significant percentage compared with the pre-renovation levels leading to a very high energy performance. Such deep renovations could also be carried out in stages. [editor’s italics]

In Article 5 it states that the renovation strategy should include, inter alia:

(c) policies and measures to stimulate cost-effective deep renovations of buildings, including staged deep renovations [editor’s italics]

The Central European University published a study in 2012 for the Global Buildings Performance Network entitled: Best Practice Policies for Low Carbon & Energy Buildings Based on Scenario Analysis. The study argued that:

The lock-in problem originates from the fact that if moderate (i.e. not low enough) performance levels become the standard in new and/or retrofit buildings, it can either be impossible or extremely uneconomic to further reduce energy consumption in such buildings for many decades to come and in some cases, for the entire remaining lifetime of the building. In other words, if during a refurbishment or new construction, a holistic optimization of building envelope and technologies is not followed, later installation of even the highest efficiency equipment or building materials will not be able to capture all the savings, otherwise attainable in a comprehensive refurbishment.

Its principal author, Diana Urge-Vorsatz, provided an excellent slide on the impact at the 2012 eceee summer study, as shown below.

The “lost” savings are quite shocking from a policy perspective, one would think.

Now, the question concerns whether we should be encouraging “staged” renovations as left possible in the EED Directive or should we be maintaining as ambitious an approach as possible, in order to meet 2020, 2030 and 2050 objectives? Your views are more than welcome.