The topic is of huge technological and economical interest, if you consider that buildings accounts for 40% of the total CO₂ emissions. Cutting off 75% (a deep renovation for GBPN) of the existing buildings energy consumption would save energy consumers a big amount of their bills and would help to meet the CO₂ and energy targets and therefore, save our planet from climate change.

The problem seems to be that we have many buildings in the world and they are all built differently, so there is not a unique renovation kit that can be used for all the buildings in the world. This means that there is a huge technological challenge for the construction companies to deeply renovate a building at a reduced cost. Moreover, the investment required to reach 75% energy consumption reduction might in some cases be so high that it would take many years to recover it based on energy bill savings alone. Therefore, more innovative investment business models need to be investigated and developed.

Despite all this, the building owners have acknowledged that the energy efficiency label of their building will increasingly influence the building value, meaning that an energy deep renovation pays off not just in lower energy bills, but also in higher building value. Our research so far confirms that there is a need to document the existing deep renovation projects better and to take a look at possibilities to reduce costs. These good practices should be replicated across the world to boost the market growth and should convince investors to believe in this market and therefore, convince them that financing this type of projects are a good business for them and for the environment.
In the project “More and Deeper Renovation” we want to involve leading experts on deep renovation of the world to feed into our research. With this aim we organized two webinars last year around the topic: What is deep renovation? What are the criteria to select best practices? Which are the most relevant deep renovation projects or existing policies on renovation that can be used to replicate and upscale best practices across the world? What is the cost of a Deep Renovation? The research around Definitions is presented in the DR Definitions Paper.

We continue this work as part of the 2013 work programme. I invite everybody interested in the topic to work with us and to express their thoughts on the Laboratory “More and Deeper Renovation”. Working alone is a start, but if we work together we will get stronger. We are looking forward to collaborating with you!

Related News

• [Report] The GBPN Defines the Concept of Deep Renovation
• [Event] The GBPN at ECEEE Summer Study, Meet us There!

Related Report Bundles

• 什么是深度改造的定义？
• What is a Deep Renovation Definition?

Related Laboratory Projects

• More and Deeper Renovation
• 深度改造