The start of the strategy’s design aims to create roadmaps to help families renovate their homes and be more efficient

In order to develop a strategy that serves as a roadmap to address the energy renovation processes in families suffering from energy vulnerability, it is necessary to design measures that consider all the existent barriers. For this reason, from Ecoserveis and within the framework of the RENOVERTY project, it is being promoted a group that designs and identify barriers and possible solutions. The goal? Help families when they are starting an energy renovation project. Specifically, the co-design cycle that is now ending has based its analysis on a sample collected thanks to twenty energy audits and on the creation of three work spaces, one with citizens and two more with actors who may be related to the energy rehabilitation process of homes, either from the local administration or business side. And, nevertheless, the conclusions of the study carried out so far are clear: both from the citizenship side and from the technical side, a wide range of barriers are identified that are more linked to access to rehabilitation than to the most technical part of it. That is to say, the great barrier of rehabilitation is everything prior to the moment of formalizing an energy rehabilitation project.

First barrier: the budget

The major barrier identified in the activities carried out by the RENOVERTY project is the economic. Dealing with the costs associated with a rehabilitation project is expensive and, if you add the inflation in the prices of materials in recent times, the grievance increases. The solution to this barrier would be to improve access to financing and tax credits. However, both have also been categorized as barriers in themselves. On the one hand, despite having access to subsidies, the family is the one who has to advance the money. In addition, the various grants are difficult to process and are often left on hold due to requirements regarding the information to be provided. And if it’s not complex enough, the documentation to be presented can vary between one type of aid or another, creating a funnel between the planning of the rehabilitation and the work to be carried out.

Context

This accumulation of requests can aggravate the current situation of the construction sector and the installer sector. During the co-design of the strategy, specialists in rehabilitation projects have expressed that both sectors are getting old and have few personnel to execute the works. In addition, the use of certain materials or others for the works requires a specific type of training, which represents another barrier if the execution time of the work is extended too much if the staff format at the end desist from proceeding.

Access to information

Thus, if the financial and implementation barriers are resolved, training for families comes into play. How information arrives about what energy rehabilitation is, what benefits it brings associates, what help is available and who can be addressed are questions that need to be addressed. Administrations, rehabilitation offices, local energy communities, estate managers, rehabilitation agents… All of them are fundamental actors for empowerment in energy terms. In addition, it must be taken into account that even if the families receive this information and agree to want to rehabilitate their homes, most of them live in rented accommodation or in neighboring communities, where some mediation is needed, either with the property or with the rest of the community. In some cases, and above all if we consider those multi-family homes, there is not even a consolidated community of owners or the figure of an estate administrator. For all this, the study considers it essential that there is a “mediating” figure who can offer support throughout this process.

More information about the RENOVERTY project at the link.

* Co-funded by the European Union under project ID 101077033. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or CINEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.