About building renovation and energy saving

 about energy saving in energypost

 

It’s a message we are starting to see a lot. If ambitious climate policies struggling to be implemented today had been launched a decade ago, Europe wouldn’t have a Russian oil and gas problem. Andreas Rüdinger at IDDRI looks at buildings renovations in France. Two missed targets, proposed in 2008, are a 38% reduction in energy consumption in existing buildings by 2020, and 400,000 “major” renovations annually. If they had been met, natural gas consumption could have been reduced by about 100 TWh, equivalent to French imports of Russian natural gas in 2019. Rüdinger runs through the various policies the government is now considering. He draws particular attention to France’s freezing of gas and electricity tariffs for all consumers – to cope with the current crisis – which will cost €20bn in 2022. That’s enough to fund an ambitious 10-year nationwide renovation programme of poorly insulated buildings. As Rüdinger says, “we cannot waste another decade”.