FIEC backs renovation

FIEC is backing a campaign to reduce energy demand and cut emissions of greenhouse gases, and which it also said would “help stimulate activity in a key sector of the economy through creating new, skilled employment to help sustain Europe’s future growth and competitiveness”.

Renovate Europe Day was held this week, and FIEC (the European Construction Industry Federation) chose that day to announce its membership of the Renovate Europe Campaign.

Speaking during the event, which was held in Brussels to discuss how the EU and national governments could scale up renovation activities, FIEC director general Ulrich Paetzold, spoke of the enormous potential of renovation activities.

He said, “The recent study compiled by Copenhagen Economics and unveiled today clearly shows that as much as €175 billion per year could flow into public coffers if the full potential of renovation activities is realised.”

He described it as the clearest evidence yet that investment in existing buildings brought added value to the economy as a whole, and could help generate additional revenue to national governments.

FIEC said it had consistently campaigned for the development of ambitious policies both at EU and national levels to promote renovation activities so that a real market could be developed in this area.

It said that such ambition required adequate large-scale financing instruments such as credit schemes and fiscal incentives, but also non-financial barriers such as lack of awareness and lack of confidence in the market needed to be tackled.

In FIEC’s view, one of the main ways of achieving this was ensuring that the energy performance certificate, mandatory under EU law, became a reliable tool for householders and businesses in assessing their building’s consumption of energy.

It called for fiscal incentives and subsidy schemes to be made conditional on “a demonstrable increase in the building’s certification rating”. It also said the emphasis of vocational training should be shifted to ensure that technologies linked to energy efficient building techniques were mainstreamed into curricula.

The Renovate Europe Campaign was created in 2011 so that an ambitious roadmap could be drawn up on how to triple the annual renovation rate of the EU building stock from the current rate of 1% to 3% by 2020. It also aims to ensure that the aggregate result of those renovations leads to an 80% reduction of the energy demand of the building stock by 2050 as compared to 2005.

At present 23 companies and associations support the Renovate Europe Campaign.