Energy awareness services
General context
For a number of years now, it has been known that the reduction of energy consumption and of other resources like water are major problems that mankind must tackle urgently. The housing sector in Europe accounts for 40% of energy consumption. This problem is particularly hard to solve in the social housing sector where tenants' incomes are already severely affected by the recent fuel price increases and where the capacity of the tenants to absorb the additional costs of energy efficiency works is very low.
Many solutions exist, but often the costs of improvement works greatly exceed the benefits in terms of reduced operating costs. Some solutions are applicable only on a very small proportion of the stock and their effect will not be visible for many years.
For example, the application of regulations for new buildings only concerns around 1% of the stock will have a limited influence on overall energy consumption.
In 20 years, a division by a factor 4 of energy consumption in this part of the stock will affect a reduction of only 12,5% on the average of all stock and the economic situation of the tenants living in the old dwellings will not have changed.
In the case of the refurbishment of the existing stock, the investment will be very high (a minimum of 20 k€ per dwelling will be necessary to reduce by a factor 2 the energy consumptions: from 240 kWh/m² to 120 kWh/m²). Therefore, it is not possible, for many reasons (financial, cultural: willingness of landlords), to treat more than 2% of the stock per annum. The reduction of energy consumption in the stock will only be 20% at the end of a 20 year period and more than the half of the tenants will continue to live in the same conditions - if not worse as a result of energy price increases.
Therefore, we have to consider urgently all measures necessary, in the short term, to enable investment in the entire stock - measures financially acceptable to all parties that will have to contribute to the investment (state, region, local authorities, social housing companies and tenants). We have also to consider that energy consumption does not depend only of the thermal efficiency of the walls and the efficiency of some equipment, but also of the behaviour of the people living in the dwellings.
These considerations have been fully taken into account by the SAVE@Work4Homes project when a consortium of six social housing companies applied to the European Commission to assist them in bringing new Energy Awareness Services, outlined in this guide, to their tenants.
General approach of Energy Awareness Services
The social housing companies involved in the SAVE@Work4Homes project have developed and evaluated a complementary set of viable and effective Energy Awareness Services, based on a "toolbox" of components including:
- automatic monitoring of consumption and transmission of consumption data in respect of heating costs;
- analysis and presentation of consumption data for access by tenants via Internet or other methods;
- self-assessment scheme to assess the success of residents of a housing unit in reducing their energy consumption;
- improvement of heating controls and feedback to users of heating settings;
- tenant portals in the Internet;
The means used are:
- notebooks by property managers;
- Internet access by tenants with low-cost WebTV or their own PC or notebook;
- Design of print media for tenants such as a handbook for identifying possible changes in building use behaviour of all residents to save energy.
