Breakthrough for serial renovation of residential buildings
On Monday evening (25th November 2019), the Energiesprong Volume Deal was announced at the German Energy Agency’s (Dena) Energiewendekongress (Energy transition Congress) in Berlin. Twenty-two housing companies have joined forces to renovate over 10,000 apartments in a climate-friendly and socially responsible manner.
The volume deal, a joint declaration of intent by the housing industry and the construction industry, marks the first breakthrough in the market development of serial renovation solutions in Germany. Twenty-two housing companies are pooling their demand and providing 11,635 apartments to be successively renovated over the next four years. In addition, four construction companies have agreed to work intensively on the development of economically attractive and scalable comprehensive solutions by March 2020. On the policy side, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy supports the market establishment of serial renovation in Germany.
“Serial renovation solutions are an important building block for successful building energy transition, which can give new impetus to the renovation market”, said Andreas Feicht, State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy on the occasion of the announcement.
The goal is to establish a completely new renovation solution based on digitised processes and a high degree of prefabrication. The buildings are scanned with 3-D scanners, with industry 4.0-millimetre precision, so that the prefabricated façades and solar roof elements – including windows, insulation and exterior plaster – only need to be mounted on the site. The entire system technology comes together in a prefabricated energy module. Thus, the net zero standard for retrofits with significantly shorter construction site times and socially acceptable costs should be achieved. A zero-to-zero or net zero energy standard is achieved when buildings themselves produce all the energy they need year-on-year for heating, hot water and household electricity.
Next step
“Energiesprong is a major contributor to the integrated energy transition in the building sector, with serial renovation solutions such as these having the potential to double climate-friendly redevelopment, and we’ve taken a giant step in that direction”, said Andreas Kuhlmann, Chairman of Dena’s board. “The Energiesprong Volume Deal is an important signal to the housing and construction industry in Germany as it shows that energy transition is socially compatible”. Kuhlmann continued, “In the upcoming process, with the market development team, we will closely follow and support the construction and housing companies”.
The serial retrofit solution, based on the Energiesprong principle, is an internationally-acclaimed, digitised and industrialised building process with prefabricated elements that can be used to refurbish buildings in a way that is fast, climate-friendly and tenant-friendly. Dena alone estimates the potential for smaller to medium-sized apartment buildings built between the 1950s and 1970s in Germany to be around 500,000 buildings. As a next step, the principle can also be applied to other types of buildings, such as large multi-family houses, one-family houses or communal buildings.
