Airtightness in the Retrofit of Historic Buildings: Investigation of a retrofit strategy for historic traditional buildings, optimizing their energy-efficiency, indoor environment quality, and heritage preservation

Despite being a critical aspect in improving the building stock’s environmental performance and achieving the global environmental goals, the retrofit of traditional historic buildings is hindered by a lack of comprehensive guidelines tailored to their complex building physics and heritage preservation requirements. The conventional retrofit...

Unclogging the grid: a study on how deep energy renovations can reduce the load on the electrical energy grid and create a self-sufficient building

With the rise of all-electric buildings the load on the electrical grid grows. This could slow down the energy transition and densification of existing neighbourhoods as the current grid is not capable to withstand a higher load. This research gathers literature on different peak shaving techniques to create a clear overview and investigates the...

Including justice in renovation policies considering the socio-spatial vulnerability to energy poverty: A Case Study-Mixed Methods (CS-MM) approach

Driven by climate change and energy crises, an increasing number of households in the European Union are becoming vulnerable to energy poverty. However, current renovation programs fall short in effectively targeting and addressing the needs of vulnerable groups, particularly in underprivileged neighborhoods where low effectiveness rates and...

Optimising the involvement of tenants in the decision-making process for energy efficiency renovation: Revealing behavioural barriers of tenants

Energy efficiency renovation (EER) of the existing residential housing stock is crucial to achieving further decarbonization to be climate neutral by 2050. This transition is particularly challenging for affordable rental housing providers as they have to make intensive investment decisions while balancing rental affordability for their low- and...

Industrialized renovation of the building envelope: realizing the potential to decarbonize the European building stock

Given the European building stock’s current size and state, its potential to be renovated up to an energy-neutral quality is getting much attention, contributing to energy transition and other sustainable and societal benefits. To tackle this potential, both the number of buildings that undergo renovation and the amount of the resulting energy...

Local authority web portals for the adoption of low-carbon technologies by homeowners: Evaluation report Triple-A

Through the Interreg2Seas Triple-A project, seven Local Authorities (LAs) identified and developed a set of modules for strengthening LA web portals for increasing awareness and easy access for housing retrofit, to encourage homeowners across four European Countries (Belgium, France, Netherlands and UK) to adopt different low-carbon technologies...

The Total Cost of Living in Relation to Energy Efficiency Upgrades in the Dutch, Multi-Residential Building Stock

Decarbonizing the housing stock is one of the largest challenges in the built environment today, and is getting attention not only from policymakers, but also from social housing corporations, financial and tenants’ organisations. In line with the international Paris-Climate-Change-Conference 2015, Dutch cities and housing associations have...

Transaction costs as a barrier in the renovation decision-making process: A study of homeowners in the Netherlands

The renovation of housing stock in the Netherlands has the potential to help achieving the country's climate change targets. However, there are non-monetary Transaction Cost (TC) factors, such as searching for information and finding a reliable professional/contractor, that present barriers to householders when making the decision to renovate...

The relation of energy efficiency upgrades and cost of living, investigated in two cases of multi-residential buildings in the Netherlands

Purpose: Decarbonising the housing stock is one of the largest challenges in the built environment today, which is getting the attention not only from policymakers but also from social housing corporations, financial organisations and users. In line with the international Paris-Climate-Change-Conference 2015, Dutch cities and housing...

Decision support tools for energy efficient and healthy school buildings

Property owners are being forced to increase the energy efficiency of their buildings. Besides energy efficiency the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of a larger part of Dutch primary school buildings is insufficient. This affects the performance, productivity and health of students and staff, and additionally has monetary consequences for...

Innovation of Conservation: Towards Energy Efficient Monuments

Monuments are often not energy efficient, yet improving the energy performance without harming the cultural values is still a complex process. By only conserving a building without making adaptations, a mismatch can arise between the demand of the user and the building. Next to that, using Building Information Modeling (BIM) to assess the...

Dynamic building stock modelling: Application to 11 European countries to support the energy efficiency and retrofit ambitions of the EU

A dynamic building stock model is applied to simulate the development of dwelling stocks in 11 European countries, over half of all European dwellings, between 1900 and 2050. The model uses time series of population and number of persons per dwelling, as well as demolition and renovation probability functions that have been derived for each...