Specific Barriers to Massive Scale Energetic Refurbishment for Sample Markets in Europe

International bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the United Nations agree in seeing the built environment as one of the key sectors to mitigate emissions. Cost abatement curves as generated by McKinsey list a number of technologies in the building sector, which are already cost effective and are together potentially allowing for carbon mitigations of 2,0-3,0 Gtons of CO2eq per annum. Despite being economically attractive as well as desirable from a climate change mitigation viewpoint, almost none of these technologies are massively upscaling. The European Union requires the individual member countries to implement measures to speed up energy efficiency in the building sector. Each country however is free on the exact way how to do so as long as its specific approach is in line with the general EU road-map. This paper assesses the effect of the implemented frameworks for France and Germany and draws conclusions regarding immediate and future phenomenon. Findings are that both countries have implemented holistic frameworks that include legal standards, financial incentives and market education. While the German setup focuses on systemic solutions though, France promotes a component based subsidy scheme. In both countries the refurbishment rate on a component level is substantially higher than for deep renovation with window exchange and roof refurbishment being the most commonly implemented ones. Component based measures are higher in France than in Germany, in some cases even meeting the aimed for 3% needed for a refurbishment of the complete building stock by 2050 on an EU level. In general however both countries fail to achieve refurbishment and renovation rates that enable them to stand up to the EU 2050 targets yet, indicating that the market barrier and mechanisms have to be monitored and understood better to implement massive up-scaling of energy efficient technologies.