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Innovative financing offers: embarking homeowners on an ambitious home energy renovation journey.
For homeowners, lack of affordable, long-term and up-front financing remains one of the major barriers for them to carry ambitious home energy renovations. Innovative public financing schemes deployed in France, the Netherlands and Belgium address the problem and bring positive results. Although...
Portraits of players: interview with Christophe Dujardin and Raphaël Claustre, Île-de-France Energies
Christophe Dujardin and Raphaël Claustre, respectively Chairman of the Executive Board and Managing Director of Ile-de-France Energies, tell us more about the development of their services for condominiums and individual homeowners. They testify the emergence and development of a new profession:...
The renovation of the Fugue Tower building by Île-de-France Energies: an ambitious energy retrofit project of a Paris condominium
In March 2022, the co-owners’ association of the Fugue Tower building, one of the tallest high-rise block of flats in Paris, approved the work programme of an ambitious energy retrofit project. The complete overhaul of the building, decided in April 2019, will upgrade the building’s safety...
Home energy renovation: two examples of successful innovative public financing schemes in France and the Netherlands
Six French regions and a small Dutch town have launched unprecedent support services and financing solutions for homeowners who wish to renovate their homes. It has never been easier for them to invest because… they do not need to invest! Home renovations are key for the EU to reduce CO2 emissions...
How to make Integrated Home Renovation Services financially viable?
The Integrated Home Renovation Service (IHRS) providers often face the question: ‘Is this model financially viable on a long-run?’. The answer is: no, unless the public authorities subsidize awareness raising and technical assistance activities leading to deep energy renovations. The six existing...
Portraits of players: interview with Alice Morcrette, director of “Haut-de-France Pass Rénovation”
PLEASE, INTRODUCE YOURSELF AND OUTLINE YOUR CAREER. HOW DID YOU BECOME DIRECTOR OF THE SPEE (public energy efficiency agency) FOR THE HAUTS-DE-FRANCE REGION? I trained as a scientific engineer in materials chemistry, first at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Paris (now Chimie Paris Tech...
Third-party financing companies: an interesting model for stimulating demand for deep home renovation
25 May 2022 Retrofitting residential buildings to energy-efficient standards has been a key component of the action plans developed by successive French governments to achieve the objectives of the national low-carbon strategy (SNBC). This, however, requires individual homeowners to overcome a...
Public-private partnerships: a promising solution for increasing the pace of home renovation but difficult to set up
If Europe wants to increase its buildings’ renovation rate, private finance has to be mobilised to complement public funds. Ideally through public-private partnerships that are still difficult to set up. The European Commission launched the ‘NextGenerationEU’ programme to accelerate the post-Covid...
ORFEE: Office for Renovations and Financing for Energy Efficiency
ORFEE is a European H2020-funded project built with the first four French third-party financing companies and that aims to strengthen their activity as technical and financial assemblers for the renovation of private housing. This project is coordinated by Energies Demain.THIRD-PARTY FINANCING?...
Could ‘do-it-yourself’ energy renovation increase low renovation rates?
An international study reveals that ‘do-it-yourself’ energy renovation could help increasing renovation rates if it is structured and supported by institutional frameworks. These are yet to be built. In Europe, buildings represent 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions. The current...
Portraits of players: interview with Gabriel Quentin, technical manager of Oktave
As part of a series of portraits of energy renovation players, today we meet a committed, creative player who is constantly on the move: Gabriel Quentin, technical manager of Oktave, the third-party financing company in the Grand-Est region. WHAT IS YOUR BACKGROUND? I started out as a...
The new European Performance of Buildings Directive: homes with energy class F and G shall disappear from the market by 2033.
The European Commission has proposed a revision of the European Performance of Buildings Directive directive in December 2021. One of the most innovative measures: the worst performing residential buildings in each country – homes with F and G energy label – will have to disappear from the real...
Third-party financing, a French innovation to drastically upscale energy efficient home renovation
The ORFEE project works with four third-party financing companies (sociétés de tiers financement, or “STFs”) to ensure that French homeowners receive high-quality technical support and affordable financing for their energy efficient home renovation projects. However, what exactly are STFs? As can...