Energy efficiency in french homes: how much does it cost?

Edouard Civel and Jérémy Elbeze

Working Papers from Chaire Economie du climat

Abstract: A strong cut in heat consumption can be realized by the thermal renovation of buildings: this article gives an assessment of energy savings achievable in the French residential stock and their associated investment costs. A bottom-up approach, using a dataset on material and labor costs for renovations and a thermal model (including a representation of the “rebound effect”) is applied to a description of existing dwellings in France. Renovation investment costs increase with the efficiency target of the housing stock: two inflection points are identified, for 40% and 60% reduction targets. If the first inflection is driven by a quantity effect, the second one is pushed by a price effect. Specificities of the thermal renovation market imply a lock-in risk: at the micro-scale, the discount rate could induce households to realize low ambition renovations, whereas at the macro-scale, having successive short-term objectives triggers important over-costs, above 15% of the optimized investment costs. We suggest that policy-makers take the risk of low ambition renovations into account, as it may nip the potential of energy savings in the bud. Relevant policies would set today the long-term efficiency target and earmark public incentives, like tax credits or interest-free loans, to ambitious renovations.

Keywords: Energy efficiency; Renovation; Residential sector; Public policy. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q47 Q48 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-eur and nep-pke
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.chaireeconomieduclimat.org/RePEc/cec/wp ... -03-Civel-Elbeze.pdf First version, 2016 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cec:wpaper:1603

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Chaire Economie du climat
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chaire Economie du Climat ().