Sustainable housing for strong communities

The Project

Investments by individual homeowners in the energy efficiency of their residential buildings are often insufficient, despite existing national approaches to funding measures. The effects of incentive measures are limited because financing programs, for example, focus on individual measures and do not sufficiently address the needs and concerns of individual homeowners. Stronghouse has analyzed the conditions and needs of this target group in more detail and, based on the results, adapted and redesigned existing measures to motivate homeowners – individually and at the neighborhood level – to invest and reduce the environmental footprint of their homes. Together, these redesigned measures support homeowners on their journey from initial interest to planning, financing, and contracting for energy-efficient retrofits.

Goals

Stronghouse aimed to reduce the environmental footprint of 15,000 homes in the North Sea region, generate 100 million euros of investment, and reduce 50 kilotons of CO2. The project started with an analysis of the effectiveness of existing tools. Stronghouse shared, (re)organized and improved them with complementary tools, increasing their impact in the process, and delivered four support measures as project outcomes:

1. Tools and resources that enable individual homeowners to invest in energy efficiency and renewable energy use.
2. Neighborhood approach to achieve the necessary scale and investment incentives
3. Market access for regional SMEs specializing in residential energy retrofits for individual homeowners
4. Deployment strategies to implement these tools, approach and market access.

aconium responsibilities

aconium was a project partner and had the task to identify digital technologies, tools and services that can be used by homeowners to improve the energy efficiency of their building, so-called smart home technologies. For this purpose, we developed a Smart Home Manual and an e-learning course series. The latter is aimed at stakeholders such as energy consultants, local and regional authorities, non-governmental organizations and banks. The aim is to train these actors in translating policies and declarations into concrete support measures for homeowners in order to provide them with optimal assistance. The free e-learning series is available here.