Low-carbon retrofits in social housing: Energy efficiency, multidimensional energy poverty, and domestic comfort strategies in southern Europe
Social housing providers have a significant amount of influence over large housing stocks, which gives them unique opportunities to address both energy efficiency and social inclusion. However, there are significant barriers to achieving these goals in southern European contexts, where obsolete housing stocks and widespread energy poverty situations combine to create a “prebound effect”, whereby residents consume less energy than in projections of standardised patterns, thus invalidating models based on energy efficiency gains and energy production. This paper uses empirical findings from interviews with social housing providers in the metropolitan areas of Porto [Portugal] and Barcelona [Spain] to understand how this contradiction is being handled in the sector, and compares the findings with surveys of the nature and depth of energy poverty situations in a broadly defined social housing sector. Our results show that social housing providers tend to favour strategies based on retrofitting the envelopes of the buildings, and to resist installing renewable energy equipment, for which cost recoupment is near-unachievable. We argue that this focus on achieving thermal comfort by passive measures overlooks the multidimensionality of energy poverty situations in the social housing sector, with widespread practices of restrictions on cooking, lighting and DHW uses
Lise Desvallées ()
Additional contact information
Lise Desvallées: LATTS - Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Université Gustave Eiffel
Post-Print from HAL
Date: 2022-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-eur and nep-ure
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03456394v1
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Published in Energy Research & Social Science, 2022, 85, pp.102413. ⟨10.1016/j.erss.2021.102413⟩
Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-03456394v1/document (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:hal:journl:hal-03456394
DOI: 10.1016/j.erss.2021.102413
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().