20 C O N T E X T 1 4 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 7 CARSTEN HERMANN Improving the performance of buildings and urban areas While the energy performance challenges in Germany and the UK are similar, policy approaches and their implementations differ significantly between the two countries. The energy inefficiency of older buildings, compared to today’s new-built, has long been recognised as a contributor to anthropogenic climate change, for example in the form of carbon dioxide emissions, and socioeconomic problems, such as fuel poverty.At a European level, these issues were addressed more seriously in 2003 with the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD), due for implementation into national laws by 2006. A recast of the directive in 2010 required European Union member states to make further improvements. But what does this mean in practice for the retrofit of historic buildings and historic urban areas? Let’s take a look at some governmental policies and associated implementation activities in the UK and Germany, aimed at incentivising energy-related retrofits of buildings and urban areas. (I have chosen Germany simply because I know the context there better than elsewhere in Europe.) Although retrofit measures suitable for historic buildings are readily available on the market, their uptake is slow.The challenge today is less about developing new technologies and rather to better understand the impacts of retrofit measures, especially their side effects, in order to choose a retrofit measure appropriate in a specific situation, and to create suitable market conditions to support their implementation. Improving the energy performance of historic building fabric is a complex undertaking.The Responsible Retrofit GuidanceWheel, developed with UK government funding by the Sustainable Traditional Buildings Alliance, displays this complexity well visually, highlighting the challenges in traditional building retrofit because of the uncertainty of existing data and research, the complexity of interactions, and possible conflicting priorities and values. The wheel was born from concerns that governmental policies to implement the EPBD in the UK, foremost the Green Deal,were potentially damaging to historic buildings. The UK government introduced the Green Deal in 2012 as a financial instrument ‘designed to improve energy efficiency in... homes at no upfront cost to householders’ by allowing them ‘to pay for [energy-efficiency] improvements through savings on their energy bills’1.To establish which retrofit measures were eligible under the Green Deal and appropriate for a specific building, and to estimate the energy savings these measures would achieve, certified Green Deal assessors were trained to act as advisors to utility companies that were implementing Green Deal retrofits through government-provided loans. Following a change of government in 2015, the Green Deal was discontinued after only three and a half years without replacement. (In January of this year, the remains of the Green Deal were sold to a private investment company.) To become a Green Deal advisor accredited for References 1 Palmer, J, and Cooper, I (2014) United Kingdom housing energy fact file: 2013, Department of Energy and Climate Change The uncoordinated installation of roof panels can have a severe adverse impact on the visual appearance of historic settlements, as in the case of this Bavarian village. (Photo: Werner Falk, Gunzenhausen)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=