Special Issue "Energy-Efficient Housing Renovation"

Dear Colleagues,

The renovation of the existing residential building stock is essential to meet the climate goals. Nearly 40% of final energy use is related to the built environment. The EU wants to be nearly carbon-free in 2050, and to reduce 55% emissions by 2030 (Fit for 55). About 70% of the building stock of 2050 will consist of the current buildings, which implies a huge challenge for the renovation of these buildings. 

To reach the goals, both the rate and depth of renovation need to increase [1,2]. The current annual renovation rate of the building stock varies from 0.4 to 1.2% in the Member States [3]. This rate will need to at least double in order to reach the EU’s energy efficiency and climate objectives [4]. Every year, 11% of the EU’s existing building stock undergoes some level of renovation. However, renovation works to address the energy performance of buildings are at a rate as low as 1%, with deep renovation being at  0.2% [3]. Bottlenecks to increasing the rate and depth of renovations relate not only to technical limitations, but also to financial, institutional, regulatory, and informational barriers.

The focus of this Special Issue is on the research and practical implementation of housing renovations that aim to increase the energy efficiency of dwellings while providing ways to overcome different barriers. Such results constitute best practices on a European level and beyond, regarding how the upgrade of the existing residential building stock can be facilitated.

The Special Issue aims to address the complexity of housing renovations in a holistic way, which includes topics such as the development of renovation concepts, their data-driven optimization and digitization, the role of occupants’ behavior and the importance of post-occupancy evaluation in energy transition, and the importance of stakeholders and value chain innovation.

By presenting new research results that build on existing literature on those topics, we aim to identify the links and how the possible interactions of such experiences can support the energy transition of existing houses.

Dr. Thaleia Konstantinou
Prof. Dr. Henk Visscher
Guest Editors

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• energy efficiency
• energy transition
• renovation strategies
• residential building stock
• low-temperature heating
• end user
• post-occupancy
• stakeholders