How to deliver a renovation revolution in Europe’s buildings

This handbook is a three step, practical guide for governments, businesses, and financial institutions, on how to drive up Europe's energy renovation rates.

Slashing emissions in Europe, and an ambitious renovation revolution, hinges on greater collaboration. The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) in the EU seeks to upgrade Europe’s building stock to a zero emissions level by 2050, and the EU is aiming to renovate at least 35 million buildings by 2030. Yet at the current pace, it would take at least a century to renovate Europe’s existing building stock into highly efficient, sustainable buildings, with renovation rates stuck at just 1% per year.

Key findings

To achieve the continent’s ambitious energy renovation goals, step 1 of the handbook sets out several key barriers that must be addressed:

• Financial constraints are a major obstacle, and labour shortages around green skills and training are harming the implementation of energy renovations

• Lengthy permitting lead times are slowing the pace of change, while the availability of up-to-date data on Europe’s building stock hampers effective planning

• A lack of awareness about the multiple benefits of energy renovations, and misaligned incentives between property owners and tenants, are hurting market adoption and blocking renovations on a significant scale

Step 2 shares scalable and replicable renovation projects from across Europe, implemented by our Renovation Revolution partners. They are Carrier, CBRE, Danfoss, Rockwool, Siemens, Signify and VELUX, and this handbook also draws on the insights of energy and building experts like Renovate Europe and the governments of European states and regions in our Under2 Coalition.

Finally, step 3 identifies five key enablers of progress that the public, private and financial sectors must put in place to overcome the obstacles and accelerate progress on energy renovations together:

• Aggregating renovation projects to unlock financing

• More collaborative planning to better align public and private activities

• Improved use of data for smarter, more evidence-based decision-making

• Embedding energy efficiency in ESG standards to increase the incentives to invest in energy renovations

• Linking energy renovations and the EV infrastructure roll out to tap into momentum in this area of climate action

This report is also published on Climate Group. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.