COllaboration for Housing Nearly Zero-Energy RENOvation

Abstract

The building stock has a big importance in reaching Europe’s climate goals. The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive therefore states the need for nearly zero-energy buildings. Nearly zero-energy buildings are a key aspect to reduce the energy use of the built environment. Since a large share of the building stock of 2050 currently already is present, focus should not only be on energy targets for newly built dwellings, but attention should also go to renovation of the current building stock. Renovation to nearly zero-energy buildings (NZEB) however is currently not standard and often deals with many barriers. These barriers currently impede the occurrence of a volume market for NZEB renovations.
The IEE-funded project Collaboration for Housing Nearly Zero-Energy Renovation (COHERENO) aims to assist in creating such volume market, specific for single-family owner-occupied houses. The five participating countries include Austria, Belgium, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands. The main objective of COHERENO is to strengthen the collaboration of enterprises in innovative business schemes to develop NZEB renovation in owner-occupied single-family homes.
The project shows how existing barriers to effective cooperation can be eliminated and better services for different customer segments can be developed. While technological solutions for NZEB renovation are available at a demonstration level, there is a lack of supply-chain collaboration models. Better communication and awareness of each other’s activities is one of the central ideas in promoting better collaboration between different service providers. Therefore, during the early stages of the project, experienced market players in participating countries and their roles within the renovation chain were mapped.
Business Collaboration Events were organized in participating countries to counter supply-side market fragmentation and encourage collaboration. BCEs pave the way for the uptake of new business models and represent the starting point for a long-term NZEB renovation network beyond COHERENO. With participants of the BCEs expressing interest and other interested NZEB frontrunners real business models (also called collaboration structures and consortia) were developed, being the final output of COHERENO.
The 14th October 2015 COHERENO project partners presented results of analysis of collaboration structures and of workshops with actors of the planning and construction process about business modelling. The event focused on collaboration structures and a best-practise-example of every country was presented. You can see the whole final conference via YouTube-video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tBW1pT4a34&list=PLPwg_sPwHEvizdY-4EiW9UKy6O_1HgaEf
See also the COHERENO website: www.cohereno.eu for all project outcomes.