France’s energy efficiency ambitions for buildings are well off target. Buildings account for 28% of the nation’s emissions and they’ve hardly reduced since 1990 – only by 3%. It’s because of the lack of development of the buildings renovation sector, explains Andreas RĂĽdinger at IDDRI. Without it, there’s little chance of renovating 500,000 housing units per year and bringing the entire housing stock up to the "low-energy building" (BBC) … [Read more...]
Why savings from the 2009 Buildings Refits stimuli were poor. Let’s do better this time
“Shovel ready” buildings renovations and refits can play an important part in a nation’s economic recovery programme. It gets money straight into the pockets of manual workers doing the refits, across the whole country, cuts the energy bills of all (both low and high income households), and accelerates efficiency gains for meeting climate targets. But first we need to learn lessons from the U.S. renovation stimuli of 2009, says Meredith Fowlie at … [Read more...]