CATEGORY

Retrofitting

Green Finance Institute: Accelerating Retrofits Through Investment

Retrofitting Europe’s built environment would drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and position us closer to climate goals. It’s a tantalisingly tangible but costly outlook, and progress is slow. To change this, the Green Finance...

How to Innovate Retrofitting

With so many properties failing to meet contemporary energy efficiency standards, much needs to be done to save occupants from needless discomfort and expense. There are plenty of mainstream retrofit concepts, but what about...

How to Excite People About Retrofitting

Energy Team and community leaders hosting a gamified training session in Dromiskin. Image Credit: Energy Team Big cities can learn a lot from smaller communities. Dunleer, a town in the northeast of the Republic of...

Lyon Confluence: How a District is Retrofitting Heritage Buildings

SPL Lyon Confluence is carrying out a stand-out urban renewal project in a once-deprived district of central Lyon. Project Manager Etienne Vignali describes how this offers a significantly chance to undertake a large-scale decarbonisation...

CityChanger Frances Bean: Helping Public Bodies Decarbonise

Frances Bean joined the Carbon Trust, a mission-led sustainability consultancy in the UK, in 2018. As Manager in the Cities and Regions team, she supports municipalities and public bodies to understand and achieve their...

The Social Benefits of Retrofitting

While marketing it as a decent money saver, we rarely focus on the social benefits of retrofitting. Does that mean that they’re so minute as to be obsolete or do we just need a...

What No One Tells You: How to Frame Messages Around Retrofits

Retrofitting provides the tools to make older buildings airtight, temperate, pleasant places. It also decreases emissions and helps halt the damaging impact on the climate. There’s no disguising the fact that we need to...

Community Sociologist Jeni Cross: Building Better Retrofitting Behaviours

A toxic mix of bad habits and infrastructure that prevents change is holding sustainability back. This is as true for retrofitting as anything. Community sociologist Doctor Jeni Cross has dedicated 20 years to researching...

Renovating Makes Cents: How to Retrofit on a Budget

Realistically, for a shot at halting climate change, we need to make buildings more efficient, big time, with widespread retrofit rollouts in the next few years! Regardless of good intentions, that’s not easy without...

How to Motivate the Transition to Community Energy

Community energy is an agent of decarbonisation. Transition in the sector is gaining momentum. How can we motivate people to get involved and maintain that trajectory? We asked Éva Goudouneix, Community Development Manager with...

What Not to Do: How to Avoid Common Retrofitting Mistakes

Are you keen to retrofit? That’s what we like to hear. But hold your horses! Do you know what you’re doing? We mean, really know. Being ill-prepared may result in not-so-efficient changes, wasting more...

Investigating Investment: How to Pay for Retrofitting

Even knowing retrofitting will improve our standard of living and save us cash in the long run, finding the money upfront to pay for it can be a challenge. In this article, we prove...

Understand the Upgrade: Retrofitting Tools & Data

Navigating the ins and outs of energy efficiency can be challenging. If we are going to get the most out of fabric-first retrofits and smart technology options, we need a comfortable level of comprehension....

Retrofitting Reports: Prime Publications on Policy and Practice

Retrofitting is big news. The internet is home to many academic papers and reports on the subject. Aside from providing a lot of empirical data, the impressive level of research shows us just how...

Energy Standards, Ratings, and Labelling Systems

Whether you’re retrofitting or not, here are some helpful pointers for regional energy standards, ratings, and labelling systems. Stars, numbers, and alphabetical symbols indicate the optimum energy efficiency of your building and appliances. Understanding...

Geography Matters: Regional Requirements for Retrofitting

Surprisingly, geography has a big part to play in the renovations we make to our built environment. Elements around the world pose different problems. While one city experiences flooding, another is dealing with desertification....

Decarbonisation, Energy Efficiency & Retrofitting Policies

There is a plethora of retrofitting policies out there, especially in Europe, that are guiding the move to a cleaner, greener energy scene. Here is a selection of rules and guidelines that are improving...

A Growing Field: Research into Retrofitting

Research into retrofitting and the energy efficiency of buildings is a growing field. Here’s a sample of some of the most interesting papers around. An Investment Allocation Approach for Building Energy Retrofits This paper introduces a...