Abstract
Energy poverty is a common issue in social housing all over Europe, with a harder impact in Southern European countries. Social housing buildings play an important role in energy poverty. They are usually owned and managed by public institutions and usually share common characteristics and issues. Behavioural changes and energy retrofitting are interesting paths forward but some solutions do not fit well in this type of housing due to socioeconomic reasons. This paper makes a thorough analysis of possible energy efficiency measures in social housing buildings, characterizing them by energy and economic savings and investment and proposing different methods of prioritization. A rational approach of behavioural and retrofitting solutions that best fit into this particular housing type is delivered, with the aim to increase the thermal comfort of the residents and mitigate the energy poverty issue. Results show that there is a wide range of domestic efficiency measures to be applied in this type of dwellings at none or low costs, bringing annual savings per average dwelling of about 510 €/year (55% of initial energy costs) including measures both at domestic level, and at building level with a final aggregated payback of the investments to be about 1.5 years.
Highlights
Energy vulnerability is a common risk in social housing due to the low income level of the families that fall back on this type of social service [1]
Social housing buildings play an important role in energy poverty
This paper makes a thorough analysis of possible energy efficiency measures in social housing buildings, characterizing them by energy and economic savings and investment and proposing different methods of prioritization
Summary
Energy vulnerability is a common risk in social housing due to the low income level of the families that fall back on this type of social service [1]. The second way is by finding corrective solutions to their unaffordable energy consumptions, by reducing their energy expenditure while keeping, or even increasing, their thermal comfort level This approach provides a solution to the energy vulnerability issue and reduce social and health inequalities [7] joining the benefits of sustainable energy policy with low-income housing policy [8]. The case of public social housing represents a special situation because residents have neither the awareness nor the economic capacity to undertake any serious investment on building retrofit and efficient equipment replacement [23] Often, they are not the owners of the dwellings and are not entitled to make any major modification on the facilities, hindering any investment attempt [23]. Limitations of these tools to evaluate the implementation of the recommended set of measures are described and results are reviewed and corrected
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