The emergence of new innovations and their diffusion is extremely important in the field of low energy building and housing. As buildings throughout their lifecycle account for around 40% of total energy use in Europe (with over half by residential buildings), reducing the energy demand of the existing building stock and increasing non-carbon micro-generation in connection to buildings is crucial.
Due to the poor energy performance of our buildings, the sector is also amongst the most significant greenhouse gas emissions sources in Europe. Renewable energy, including solar power and ground source heat pumps, have gained increasing interest from house owners in Europe. Recently, we have witnessed increasing rates of diffusion for these technologies. Simultaneously, however, the need to improve the energy efficiency of the existing housing stock has received too little attention in many European countries, including the UK.
Why do we need this kind of low energy innovation now and not later? Because the building stock renews very slowly and investments into buildings made today will continue to impact for a long time after. This means that less efficient investments will be using more energy for a long time. It has also been acknowledged that the rate and extent of renovation needs to be increased across Europe to meet the EU climate and energy targets for 2050. In practice, this means that all of today’s buildings will need to be renovated by 2050, doubling the current building renovation rate. While EU legislation is in place to address some of the challenges, one of the problems is that renovation is still less addressed than new build. Regulations regarding the former are more problematic as unreasonable claims cannot be made to home owners. Therefore, we need to rely more on ‘carrot’, ‘sermon’ and voluntary action by a range of actors than regulation. Read more ›
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