Page 60 - European Energy Innovation - winter 2017 publication

60 Winter 2017 European Energy Innovation
BUILDINGS
What Building Stock by 2050?
By Adrian Joyce (pictured), Secretary General, The European Alliance of Companies for Energy Eficiency in Buildings
Futurists are concerned with
projecting how our societies
will be in the distant future, static a sector the construction sector
and 2050 is a favoured horizon has been in the past. So before I set
for their writings. They describe
scenarios of autonomous robots and
flying cars. But how would we like
our building stock to be in 2050?
After all, it comprises our schools, our
workplaces and our homes in which
we spend around 90% of our time!
My vision for the future of our building
stock will not feel futuristic to readers significantly in the last 33 years!),
as it is based on knowledge of how
out that vision, I would like to remind
readers of some basics in relation to
the building stock in the EU.
There are around 210 million buildings
in the EU with a heated and/or cooled
area roughly equivalent to the size of
Belgium. These buildings consume
around 40% of all primary energy
in the EU and emit over 36% (some
studies now suggest 40%) of energy-
related CO2 emissions in the EU. The
vast majority of these buildings were
built before there were any energy-
related building regulations in force
across the continent and today’s rates
of construction activity are low. It is
estimated that the rate of new building
is less than 1% and that the rate of
renovation is just about 1% across the
EU as a whole. Finally, the demolition
rate of buildings in the EU hovers
around 0.15%.
Putting these statistics together
we can see that if these rates of
activity continue over the next 33
years (and they have not changed
then more than 95% of the buildings
standing and occupied today will still
be standing and occupied in 2050,
although they will then constitute
about 75% of the total building stock.
The new buildings to be built in the
period to 2050 are required by EU law
to be nearly zero energy buildings,
but it is not clear that the Member
States have prepared in time to meet
the impending deadlines for the
introduction of regulations that will
require all substantially completed
new buildings from 1st January 2021
to be nZEB.
Turning to a topical and important
subject – the Paris Agreement on
Climate Change – we can see that our
political masters have woken up to the
gravity of our collective impact on the
Earth, the source of all the goods that
we need for well-being, by the signing
of a truly ambitious objective for
2050. That objective is to keep global
warming to well below 2°C above
pre-industrial levels. To achieve such
an objective, we will have to reduce
our greenhouse gas emissions to
practically zero by 2050 and transition
our societies to low-carbon societies.
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