New BPIE report on renovation strategies

The Buildings Performance Institute Europe (BPIE) has recently published a report on renovation strategies that are required by EU member states.

Article 4 of the 2012 Energy Efficiency Directive requires Member States, for the first time, to set out national strategies for the renovation of their building stocks.

The report focuses on 10 member states (Austria, Belgium (Brussels Capital Region), Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Netherlands, Romania, Spain and UK) that submitted within three months of the April 2014 deadline. They were chosen by the BPIE for their building stock and climate diversity. Unfortunately, the 10 strategies, while giving a spectrum of approaches and activities, do not set a clear, strategic path and most lack bold and determined action plans.

The report scores countries for each of the five requirements from the Directive’s Article 4: overview of the national building stock, cost-effective approaches to renovations, policies and measures to stimulate cost-effective deep renovations, forward-looking perspective to guide investment decisions and evidence-based estimate of expected savings and wider benefits.

BPIE found that three strategies were non-compliant (Austria, Denmark and The Netherlands), three were only partially compliant (France, Germany and Brussels Capital Region) and 4 were acceptable but still showed potential for improvement (Czech Republic, Romania, Spain and the UK). Some strategies included elements that can be considered best practice such as financial support or a wider-stakeholder process, but are weak on other aspects, varying from country to country.

Article 4 required that all Member States develop strategies which incentivise investments into the deep renovation of the building stock. Strategies are meant to provide confidence to building owners to invest in building renovation, and to the market to invest in the supply chain, but the approach taken so far in the 10 analysed strategies falls short of achieving this objective.

To achieve the required long term transformation of the existing building stock the report concludes that benefits need to be quantified better, not only in terms of energy, carbon and cost savings, but also in terms of economic impact, societal benefits and environmental improvements. Policy packages and support measures need to be developed in more detail to provide effective incentives to invest in deep renovation. It is also suggested that the European Commission should provide more effective guidance and that most strategies should be re-submitted with corrective actions taken. There has to be concern because, as of October 15, six out of 28 Member States had yet to publish their strategies, more than six months after the Commission’s deadline (Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal and Slovenia).

The report entitled Renovation strategies of selected EU countries, A status report on compliance with Article 4 of the Energy Efficiency Directive, is available on the BPIE website.