Actual Energy Savings of Renovated Dwellings

Abstract

The existing housing stock plays a major role in the realization of the energy efficiency targets. The non-profit housing sector in the Netherlands dominates the housing market as it represents 31% of the total housing stock. In the municipality of Amsterdam, where this share is even 46%, subsidies were given to housing associations between 2011 and 2014 when an energy renovation of their rental property took place and resulted in a better energy performance. The aim of this paper is to examine the impact of thermal renovation on the actual and the predicted energy consumption of the dwellings concerned and to compare both types of consumption. For the non-profit rental dwellings that have undergone renovation in Amsterdam, we use longitudinal data from 2009 to 2013 to examine their actual and predicted gas consumption before and after renovation. The main outcome of the analysis is that in almost all groups of dwellings the gas consumed after renovation decreased significantly. Most of the dwellings had a combination of measures performed and the actual gas consumption savings depend on these combinations. Despite the fact that gas savings after renovation were observed in all dwellings no pattern was found indicating that the better the predicted energy performance achieved, the
more actual savings were realized after renovation, but this may be due to the relatively small size of the sample.