The truth is that energy efficiency of residential sector has finally gained more attention among the key EU stakeholders. It became clear that the building sector is critical for achieving EU's environmental goals. However, as we pay more and more attention to this issue, investment gaps in residential sector financing of energy efficiency are becoming increasingly evident. One among many financial support mechanisms aiming at the residential sector are grants. Speaking about the existing gaps, these are not an exemption. On November 18, 2021, the Energy Community therefore organized a Workshop on financing energy efficiency in residential sector. Participating experts aimed to explore the state of energy efficiency measures in the residential sector with respect to financing.
With the aim of establishing a stable Pan-European energy market, in October 2005, the European Commission has signed the Energy Community Treaty establishing a new international organization, the Energy Community.
The main objective of this organization is to extend the EU energy acquis to countries in South East Europe, the Black Sea region and beyond. In doing so, the Energy Community seeks to improve the environmental situation, enhance economic development, and strengthen social stability across the region.
Recently, on November 30, 2021, the Energy Community held its Ministerial Council, where it adopted five key legislative acts towards the implementation of the Clean Energy for all Europeans package. At the next Ministerial Council planned for 2022, the Energy Community will adopt renewables, energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction targets for 2030.
To foster the dialogue, Energy Community actively engages the stakeholders from the field on numerous occasions. On November 18, 2021, the Energy Community organized a Workshop on financing energy efficiency in the residential sector. Above all, the energy crisis has proved that integration of small isolated markets at pan-European level is crucial. Stable environment for financing and investment decisions is key to boost energy performance of buildings that is institutionally anchored in the EU´s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive and the Energy Efficiency Directive.
Therefore, the workshop brought together speakers from various organizations and institutions who shared their insightful expertise. The main topic of their discussion was allocation and share of grants as financing tools to reach energy efficiency targets. Moreover, they also talked about different possibilities of other scaling up elements of renovations.
Among others, Tamara Babayan from the World Bank and Set Landau from the consultant firm Eco ltd. presented the findings of their extensive “Residential Energy Efficiency Market Analysis in the Western Balkans”.
Nora Cimili, Energy Efficiency Specialist from the Millennium Foundation Kosovo (MFK) presented about Pilot Subsidies on Energy Efficiency in Kosovo, that are part of Reliable Energy Landscape Project implemented via Kosovo Threshold Program that is funded by Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) - an agency of the US government.
Habitat for Humanity International was honored to participate at this workshop as well. Gyorgy Sumeghy, Associate Director, Policy and Advocacy, presented about financing gaps that exist in the housing sector of Western Balkan countries.
In these countries, homeowners associations (HOAs) of multi-apartment buildings are perceived as extremely high-risk targets of lending by banks. As Gyorgy explained, the reasons for such a restrained perspective of banking sector are various. They include limited availability of financing products, restricted institutional capacities, or viability of lending. As a result, in Western Balkan countries, lending to HOAs is insignificant, if not non-existent. Gyorgy talked about all the key gaps in banking and introduced specific recommendations for:
If interested to find out more about these, you can read the full analysis prepared by our experts here: “Gap Analysis of the Housing Sector in Western Balkans: Bosnia and Hercegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Serbia vs. Slovak Republic”.
To find out more about the presentations of other speakers, visit the website of Energy Community and feel free to download their presentations here.
Energy inefficiency and the overall low quality of the building stock in Central and Eastern Europe is one of the most alarming issues of the region. The European data on countries affected by energy poverty only confirm that the post-socialist countries are listed among the most affected ones by energy poverty. If you are aware of our REELIH project and what is the reasoning behind our interest in supporting renovation of co-owned multi-apartment buildings, you know that the primary cause of the housing issues in this region is the large number of the old building stock built during the communist era. The current high numbers of privately owned units in these residential buildings are resulting from the privatization wave after the fall of communism in 1990s. This became the main obstacle in finding consent among the owners to improve the quality of their dwellings and stepping out of the closed circle of energy poverty.
The whole problem of energy inefficient buildings stock in this region is manifold, considering all the factors that contribute to the overall high rates of energy poverty. Rising energy prices, low incomes, misfunctioning homeowner associations and lacking financial possibilities to renovate the residential buildings all together contribute to the gravity of the situation.
The energy poverty and the challenges of the socialist-era housing facilities are discussed in a new C4E Forum blog prepared by two representatives from Romanian Center for the Study of Democracy, Babes-Bolyai University, Anca Sinea and Andreea Vornicu-Chira. Learn more about the topic in this article.
is a Regional Online Workshop that took place during the last week of February 2021. It was co-organized by the Ministry of Environment and Spatial planning of Slovenia and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), together with the support of Housing Europe, the Union for the Mediterranean and UN-Habitat. The event opened up for a discussion about the undersupply of affordable housing, homelessness, rising urban rents, low quality of housing and urban infrastructure, limited access to land for housing construction and renovation, and mounting urban poverty in the UNECE region. These challenges has been long on rise, however, the Covid-19 pandemic situation made the need of sustainable and affordable housing one of the most important policy challenges of current days.
Affordable and adequate housing is far from being a standard within the UNECE region and is especially important for vulnerable groups which at the same time suffer also from limited access to healthcare, fuel poverty and price inflation. Moreover, mounting unemployment connected with Covid-19 pandemic widens the number of people in the need of housing and other basic services even more. The UNECE, representing a diverse region with ranging national and local contexts of housing sector and its legal frameworks, decided to organize this online workshop to share knowledge and good practice for inspiration and allowing others to formulate viable and sustainable solutions to long-standing housing issues in this region together with responding to the world pandemic crisis.
The workshop was organized as a two days event. The first day of the workshop was dedicated to the theme of key international initiatives on affordable housing in Europe and on governance for affordable, adequate and healthy housing for all.
The morning of the second day was reserved for discussion of #Housing2030: Improving Housing Affordability in the UNECE Region. It is a new UNECE study under development with a goal of improving capacities of national and local governments to formulate policies that improve housing affordability and sustainability in the UNECE region. As one of the topics of this study addresses housing governance and regulation, the UNECE reserved this time for workshop session with a focus on the preparation of this chapter of the #Housing2030 study.
The final session of the two-day workshop called "Governance of the housing sector: Focus on South-East Europe" was oriented towards housing policies in countries of the South-Eastern Europe.
Andrew Popelka, a representative of the USAID which provides funding for REELIH project, contributed to the session with a comprehensive presentation of a new comparative study Gap Analysis of the Housing Sector In Western Balkan Countries: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Serbia VS. Slovak Republic. The study identifies and analyses the gaps in housing regulations in the Western Balkans.
REELIH project is mentioned in this study to manifest its impact on establishing mechanisms that help people in REELIH implementing countries to find consensus and get finances for renovation of the multi-owner apartment buildings.
Andrew Popelka admits that the multi-owned apartment buildings lack the attention of the donors since the multi-ownership of the building complicates the overall decision making prior and also during the renovation works. That is another reason why REELIH works on creating more financing possibilities for these buildings, providing technical assistance and serving as a mediator in the complex environment of many stakeholders included.
We would like to thank the UNECE for organizing this workshop and to Andrew Popelka from USAID for his contribution to this workshop, again showcasing REELIH as a good practice in the region of Central and Eastern Europe.
Find more information about the UNECE workshop here.
Find a new comparative study by USAID here.
Repost from the original press release
ComAct - Community Tailored Actions for Energy Poverty Mitigation is a new project that started in October 2020. Financed by Horizon2020, ComAct is set to lift people in Central and Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union republics out of energy poverty.
Energy poverty represents a problem all over Europe and is particularly high in the East, South, South-Eastern and Baltic regions of Europe. In most of these countries,
the quality of housing is low, and the affordability of heating or cooling cost is high
despite the progress made in recent years through public investments in energy efficiency policies and measures and efforts to involve the stakeholders addressing the problem.
Implementing energy efficiency measures is more complicated in these countries than in Western Europe, particularly due to mass privatization of the housing sector combined with the deconstruction of the social safety net during the 1990s. Privately owned multi-family apartment blocks predominated and increased of energy costs became a burden to family budgets. In parallel, socialist era collective maintenance mechanisms were abandoned, whereby the decay of homeowners’ associations has not been adequately addressed.
The ComAct project is interested in solving problem of energy inefficient buildings in this region as the REELIH project does, however, its focus in more on overall issue of the energy poverty. To be piloted in Hungary, Bulgaria, Republic of North Macedonia, Lithuania and Ukraine, ComAct will provide a set of financial, technical and organizational instruments that can be replicated all over Europe to solve the "heat or eat" problem of low-income families and increase efficiency and multiple benefits coming from the renovation of multifamily buildings. The impact will already be visible in the three years timeframe of the project, with its aim to involve more than 3000 consumers and trigger almost 10 million euros of investments in sustainable energy. However, the biggest impact of ComAct lies in the lessons learned coming out of the pilots, to be replicated all over Europe.
Contribution delivered by ComAct will be key in providing EU countries a set of instruments to lift millions of its citizens out of energy poverty and to ensure that buildings provide a healthy and affordable living and working environment.
We are proud to say that the ComAct project originated from the working group of partner organizations that has been created under the REELIH project. Common interest in energy poverty in the CEE and CIS region of this group outgrew to the idea of making a case together and the willingness to contribute to the alleviation of energy poverty in a joint project. For more information about who stands behind this starting project, please, visit a brand new website of ComAct project.
Find more information about ComAct project here.
Read the full press release here.
In countries of the UNECE region, existing normative instruments for buildings' energy performance range from voluntary guidelines to mandatory standards applying to different building types. Its development is a complex decision-making process involving variety of stakeholders, like for publicly, so for privately owned buildings. New UNECE publication Promoting Energy Efficiency Standards And Technologies To Enhance Energy Efficiency in Buildings aims to provide better understanding of the status of deployment and implementation of energy efficiency standards in buildings in the UNECE region based on data gathered through desk research and stakeholder outreach.
Our HFHI Advocacy Officer Zita Kakalejcikova and our partners Marin Petrovic from Enova, Liljana Alceva from HFH Macedonia, Varsenik Khloyan from HFH Armenia and Andrew Popelka from USAID are listed among contributors to this publication in regard to REELIH project.
In this publication, residential multi-apartment buildings are defined as structures used primarily as dwellings for one or more households. Within this understanding, they address challenges of climatic conditions, latitude, legislative acts, construction practices, existing building stock and maintenance practices and occupant behavior, including enforcement, training and monitoring mechanisms. The main challenges connected with residential multi-apartment buildings in "Subregions C" and "E" *, which cover all three REELIH project implementing countries-North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Armenia, are identified as follow:
Many countries, particularly in Subregion C, experience difficulties also in increasing market deployment of energy-efficient technologies stemming from incoherent policies in regard to financial incentives, lack of consumers awareness on benefits of such technologies, insufficiently developed building energy codes and lack of technical expertise.
On the other side, the publication highlights how smart solutions show good results in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Armenia because of government-supported implementation of municipal level energy management systems resulting in higher quality of energy action plans for municipalities, for residential multi-apartment buildings and public buildings.
Publication's chapter "Best Practices on Standards and Technologies for Energy Efficiency In Buildings" identifies best practices in adopting, implementing and enforcing energy efficiency standards and energy-efficient technologies for buildings in the UNECE region. These examples are organized into sections based on their performance in legislative and behavior change, technical measures, and financial mechanisms. REELIH countries are included in the following sections:
Habitat for Humanity International thanks UNECE for recognizing all successful work done in REELIH projects and USAID and our other partners for their continuous support in these projects.
Find the publication in full here.
*UNECE member States are divided into specific subregions based on their geographical location:
Subregion A: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom;
Subregion B: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia;
Subregion C: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Republic of Moldova, Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan;
Subregion D: Canada, United States of America;
Subregion E: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia;
Subregion F: Turkey.
Israel and San Marino are not listed due to insufficiency of data required for this study.