EU dwelling stock accounts for about 200 millions units, representing around 27% of energy consumption in the EU. Three-quarters of the buildings standing today, including the residential stock, are expected to remain in use in 2050. So far, only about the 1,2% of EU’s existing buildings are renovated every year. EU’s energy efficiency challenge in buildings mainly concerns the energy efficient refurbishment and investments in its existing buildings stock. Yet, there is a clear investment gap in this sector and in particular in the housing market. This is due to the fact that high investments are required up-front and characterized by a high degree of risk with potential limited return on investments; furthermore, there is a generalized lack of confidence by both public and private investors (including owners and financial institutions).
Therefore it is necessary to develop harmonized actions that can help unlocking the public and private finance sources, fill the energy efficiency investment gap and ultimately contribute to re-launch the construction market and create new jobs.
In order to reach this, ABRACADABRA shares knowledge, builds capacity and capitalizes on all possible win-win solutions that may arise from the mutual collaboration of key financial actors, decision-makers and social stakeholders at national and EU level. These win-win solutions are based on the prior assumption that non-energy related benefits play a key role in the deep renovation of existing buildings.
In particular, ABRA actions focus on the following main benefit: the generation of a substantial increase of the real estate value of the buildings through significant energy and architectural transformation (mainly integration of Renewable Energy Sources systems with new volume additions or new buildings’ construction) to go beyond the minimum energy performance and aim at achieving Nearly Zero Energy Buildings (nZEBs). This aims to result in an important reduction of the pay-back time of the interventions, a strengthening of the key investors’ confidence, a higher quality and attractiveness of existing buildings and, finally, concrete market acceleration towards energy efficient buildings and nZEBs. Thus, this comprehensive renovation process bringing the existing building to a very high-energy performance level will be linked to the economic, financial, environmental and social co-benefits of deep renovations, taking into account the pay-back time and net present value of investments.
Several studies have been already carried out to overcome some of these barriers. By building on top of these studies, ABRA proposal aims at demonstrating to the main stakeholders the attractiveness of a renovation strategy based on new Assistant buildings’ addition and Renewable Energy Sources (AdoREs); by AdoREs we refer to one (or o set of) assistant building unit(s) like aside or façade additions, rooftop extensions or even an entire new buildings adopting the existing buildings (the assisted buildings) to deeply and comprehensively renovate them up to nZEB.
At the urban scale, ABRA proposal is thus based on the implementation of a punctual densification policy proposed as a tool to foster the investments in the deep renovation of the existing built environment in the peripheral/consolidated areas around the historical centers.
ABRA proposal combines different domains, especially “the creation of new building” for the renovation of old ones, providing the economic circle with trust and bankability and ensuring a return of the investment.
