Glass for Europe (GfE), the trade association for Europe’s flat glass sector, published a position paper on an activable Renovation Wave to meet the EU’s climate ambition and relaunch the construction sector.
The European flat glass industry welcomes the European Union’s desire to engage in a Renovation Wave of public and private buildings, as announced in the European Green Deal, and is ready to deliver the high-performance glazing EU buildings need to become carbon-neutral by 2050. Europe’s building stock is not fit for carbon neutrality and, more worryingly, current trends in terms of building renovation clearly indicate that it will not be fit in 2050 nor in one hundred years if Europe does not review the policy it has pursued for the last decade and does not scale up financial resources.
Europe’s buildings are aged and high energy consuming, despite a broad range of products available to cut their energy demand. For example, high-performance glazing could save around 37 percent of energy consumed in buildings in 2050 with a total contribution potentially higher when innovative products such as switchable/electrochromic glazing, hyper-insulating glazing or glazing-integrated photovoltaics become mainstream.
In the recent years, progress has been made to increase the energy and CO2 performance of new buildings thanks to EU legislation, yet this is merely the tree that hides the forest. 97 percent of today’s building will have to be renovated by 2050 to achieve climate neutrality, while less than 1 percent of buildings are renovated in Europe every year. Renovation is not happening in sufficient quantity and when it does take place, sub-optimal products are often used due to a lack of legal or financial incentive and/or information to consumers.
The state of the EU building stock and current renovation levels are a clear signal that the first deep renovation Europe needs is legislative. The European Union cannot limit itself to a mere communication, limited and complex financial mechanisms and the continuation of legislations that have demonstrated to be inefficient for most of the building stock. The paper proposes several concrete actions to give substance to the renovation wave to cut emissions and relaunch the economy.
To read the full paper please click here.