Although there is an array of technical solutions available for retrofitting the building stock, the uptake of these by owner‐occupants in home improvement activities is lagging. Energy performance improvement is not included in maintenance, redecoration, and/or upgrading activities on a scale necessary to achieve the CO2 reduction aimed for in the built environment. Owner‐occupants usually adapt their homes in response to everyday concerns, such as having enough space available, increasing comfort levels, or adjusting arrangements to future‐proof their living conditions. Home energy improvements should be offered accordingly. Retrofit providers typically offer energy efficiency strategies and/or options for renewable energy generation only and tend to gloss over home comfort and homemaking as key considerations in decision‐making for home energy improvement. In fact, retrofit providers struggle with the tension between customisation requirements from private homeowners and demand aggregation to streamline their supply chains and upscale their retrofit projects. Customer satisfaction is studied in three different Dutch approaches to retrofit owner‐occupied dwellings to increase energy efficiency. For the analysis, a customer satisfaction framework is used that makes a distinction between satisfiers, dissatisfiers, criticals, and neutrals. This framework makes it possible to identify and structure different relevant factors from the perspective of owner‐occupants, allows visualising gaps with the professional perspective, and can assist to improve current propositions.
MULTIFILE
An enormous challenge has risen regarding our existing housing stock, as the result of ambitious agreements to reduce global carbon emissions. Until now the focus has been mostly on improving energy efficiency technically by ameliorating the energy performance of the building envelope. Insulation, controlled ventilation, new services and devices are deployed, saving and harvesting energy. New building components and production processes have been developed to smoothen obstacles in the role-out of large-scale implementation of these measures. Also effort has been put into non-technical solutions e.g. new financial arrangements, standards and business models. This has resulted in several successful pilots in the EU to retrofit dwellings towards net-zero energy levels. Still, large-scale implementation, especially targeted at owner-occupied dwellings is lagging behind. The hypothesis is that this is due to the fact that the challenge is still mainly addressed by following concepts that belong to the paradigm of the second industrial revolution. In this paradigm central coordination, proprietary development and vertical up-scaling are key and dwellers are neglected as an essential group of stakeholders in the transformation of their dwellings. This paper will reflect on the principles used in retrofitting using the successful Dutch programme of the Stroomversnelling as a case study. What are the consequences, especially for the position of dwellers, if we rethink the developments from concepts that belong to the paradigm of the third industrial revolution? In the reflection on necessary and possible future developments experiences and insights from Open Building will be used.
Due to climate change the frequency of extreme precipitation is set to increase. To reduce the risk of damage, Dutch municipalities will need to retrofit the urban areas in a climate resilient (CR) way. To justify this investment, they need evidence for the possibilities of CR urban street designs and insight into the costs. For characteristic Dutch typologies of urban residential areas we have investigated how to retrofit the urban area. For 10 cases we designed alternatives of street lay-outs and determined the life cycle costs and benefits. This showed that most flat Dutch urban typologies can easily be retrofitted in a CR way without additional costs (compared to the standard designs).
The growing demand for both retrofitting and refitting, driven by an aging global fleet and decarbonization efforts, including the need to accommodate alternative fuels such as LNG, methanol, and ammonia, offers opportunities for sustainability. However, they also pose challenges, such as emissions generated during these processes and the environmental impacts associated with the disposal of old components. The region Rotterdam and Drechtsteden form a unique Dutch maritime ecosystem of port logistics, shipbuilding, offshore operations, and innovation facilities, supported by Europe’s largest port and world-class infrastructure connecting global trade routes. The Netherlands’ maritime sector, including the sector concentrated in Zuid-Holland, is facing competition from subsidized Asian companies, leading to a steep decline in Europe’s shipbuilding market share from 45% in the 1980s to just 4% in 2023. Nonetheless, the shift toward climate-neutral ships presents economic opportunities for Dutch maritime companies. Thus, developing CE approaches to refitting is essential for promoting sustainability and addressing the pressing environmental and competitive challenges facing the sector and has led companies in the sector to establish the Open Joint Industry Project (OJIP) called Circolab of which this PD forms the core.
The energy transition is a highly complex technical and societal challenge, coping with e.g. existing ownership situations, intrusive retrofit measures, slow decision-making processes and uneven value distribution. Large scale retrofitting activities insulating multiple buildings at once is urgently needed to reach the climate targets but the decision-making of retrofitting in buildings with shared ownership is challenging. Each owner is accountable for his own energy bill (and footprint), giving a limited action scope. This has led to a fragmented response to the energy retrofitting challenge with negligible levels of building energy efficiency improvements conducted by multiple actors. Aggregating the energy design process on a building level would allow more systemic decisions to happen and offer the access to alternative types of funding for owners. “Collect Your Retrofits” intends to design a generic and collective retrofit approach in the challenging context of monumental areas. As there are no standardised approaches to conduct historical building energy retrofits, solutions are tailor-made, making the process expensive and unattractive for owners. The project will develop this approach under real conditions of two communities: a self-organised “woongroep” and a “VvE” in the historic centre of Amsterdam. Retrofit designs will be identified based on energy performance, carbon emissions, comfort and costs so that a prioritisation strategy can be drawn. Instead of each owner investing into their own energy retrofitting, the neighbourhood will invest into the most impactful measures and ensure that the generated economic value is retained locally in order to make further sustainable investments and thus accelerating the transition of the area to a CO2-neutral environment.
De verplichting in de Binnenvaart om haar emissies te reduceren leidt tot grote uitdagingen in de sector, omdat nieuwe technologie in bestaande schepen tot problemen leidt en vaak een te grote investering vraagt. VIV, de branchevereniging van inbouw-, reparatie- en revisiebedrijven, heeft zich uitgesproken voor het gebruik van hernieuwbare methanol. Het ontbreekt de bedrijven echter aan kennis en vaardigheid over de conversie van een bestaande dieselmotor naar hernieuwbare methanol. De methanol industrie, verenigd in het Methanol Institute, zet zich in voor het gebruik van methanol in de scheepvaart. In de Zeevaart is al ervaring opgedaan met hernieuwbare methanol, maar de schaal en technologie verschilt met die in onze Binnenvaart. VIV en het Methanol Institute hebben de HAN benaderd met de vraag om de kennis en vaardigheid in gebruik van hernieuwbare methanol in scheepsmotoren te vergroten. De HAN beantwoordt deze marktvraag in 4 werkpakketten waar het draait om de retrofit conversie van een bestaande binnenvaartaandrijving, op een praktisch toepasbare manier. Ze maakt hier een vertaalslag van de wetenschap en kennis bij grote zeevaartmotoren, naar het binnenvaart-MKB. Dit gebeurt door te onderzoeken binnen welke kaders, en met welke indicatoren tijdens het afstellen van een onderzoeksmotor, een optimale methanol dual-fuel motor opgezet kan worden. Het hoofddoel is het verhogen van de kennis en vaardigheid over dual-fuel motoren op Hernieuwbare Methanol in de reparatie- en revisiesector. Het Schoon Schip project combineert de opgedane kennis met kennis uit de academische wereld, en de motorervaring van alle partners, om tot een betrouwbare toepassing van methanol in de binnenvaart te komen. Het gaat er om tot een werkende praktijkoplossing te komen voor het gebruik van hernieuwbare methanol in de bestaande vloot van 12.000 binnenvaartschepen.
