Facing the Constraints to the Deep Energy Renovation Process of Residential Built Stock in European Markets

In many countries, depending on climatic conditions and the energy performance of buildings, the built stock is highly energy-consuming and constitutes a main source of greenhouse gas emissions. This is particularly true for Europe, where most of the existing buildings were built before 2001. For this reason, EU policies have focused on the Deep Energy Renovation Process of the residential building stock as the mainstream way for its decarbonization strategy by 2050. Based on a broad investigation of seven EU local retrofitting markets carried out within the H2020 re-MODULEES project, this paper defines a holistic methodology for understanding and facing the complexity of the renovation market and its inner constraints. Thanks to systematic surveys and the activation of stakeholders’ core groups (re-LABs), the main market barriers (cultural, social, technical, processual, and financial) were explored. Through a bottom-up clustering approach and vote analysis, a relevance classification of constraints of each pilot market and a detailed scenario of the most relevant market constraints at the European level were provided. This scalable methodology offers the baseline necessary for shaping more effective, cooperative, and tailored-made policies aimed at overcoming the current limitations to the full deployment of the Deep Energy Renovation Process (DERP) across the European markets.