Plug and play for deep renovation:
Lessons learned on the decision-making process
The decision-making process is one of the biggest challenges for deep renovation: difficulty to reach an agreement between parts, lack of sufficient financing schemes, and no clear vision of expected results, just to mention a few. Plug and play options help overcome some of these concerns, as they usually enable a significant revalorization of the property through a cost-effective and fast deep retrofitting.
RenoZEB contributions
The RenoZEB project is a great example of an attempt to solve not only the first crucial step that is decision-making, but also at offering holistic innovative solutions of retrofit with a human-centric approach and plug and play options, such as modular prefabricated panels. Thanks to this project and its demo cases, there are some lessons learned that can be useful to all that wish to influence the decision-making process towards the adoption of new insulation and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning technologies into the renovation market.
LESSONS PRESENTED AT THE BUILDHEAT WEBINAR
Last week, during the BuildHeat webinar, these lessons and others from different initiatives were put together and presented. Here is a list of a few of them:
– Usually individual undertakings are not difficult to be supported by homeowners and occupiers, a solution to this can be clustering properties, mitigating risks and sharing costs and benefits.
– To overcome access to financing problems, offering risk assessment is a great strategy as for each actor risks and benefits must be identified, quantified and managed; for the real estate, lower risks mean reduced loan and insurance costs and simplifies investments.
– In some countries, thanks to some strong fiscal incentives to private owners of multi apartment buildings, the identified early adopters (e.g. condominiums) will implement solutions as part of real renovation and retrofitting actions.
– Offering contractor services committed to design, assess and implement the retrofit actions to get the desired energy efficiency level of performance is another great tool that reinforces trust and willingness to engage in these retrofitting solutions.
