The emergence of new innovations and their diffusion is extremely
important in the field of low energy building and housing. As buildings
throughout their lifecycle account for around 40% of total energy use in
Europe (with over half by residential buildings), reducing the energy
demand of the existing building stock and increasing non-carbon
micro-generation in connection to buildings is crucial.
Due
to the poor energy performance of our buildings, the sector is also
amongst the most significant greenhouse gas emissions sources in Europe.
Renewable energy, including solar power and ground source heat pumps,
have gained increasing interest from house owners in Europe. Recently,
we have witnessed increasing rates of diffusion for these technologies.
Simultaneously, however, the need to improve the energy efficiency of
the existing housing stock has received too little attention in many
European countries, including the UK.
Why do we need this kind of
low energy innovation now and not later? Because the building stock
renews very slowly and investments into buildings made today will
continue to impact for a long time after. This means that less efficient
investments will be using more energy for a long time. It has also been
acknowledged that the rate and extent of renovation needs to be
increased across Europe to meet the EU climate and energy targets for
2050. In practice, this means that all of today’s buildings will need to be renovated by 2050, doubling the current building renovation rate.
While EU legislation is in place to address some of the challenges, one
of the problems is that renovation is still less addressed than new
build. Regulations regarding the former are more problematic as
unreasonable claims cannot be made to home owners. Therefore, we need to
rely more on ‘carrot’, ‘sermon’ and voluntary action by a range of
actors than regulation.
Increasingly, so-called
intermediary actors have been found important in innovation processes.
Innovation intermediaries are organisations or individuals that can act
as go-betweens for people, funds, knowledge and ideas that in
combination may result in innovation. Intermediaries may (1) bridge
actors that have not previously connected with each other, (2) fill
knowledge deficits by transferring information from one source or actor
to others, (3) match-make between actors to connect human and financial
resources with innovation processes, or (4) create demand for policy
change without driving the interests of any specific party.
Examples
of successful intermediaries in driving the energy efficiency of the
building and housing sector do exist in Europe. For example, the Finnish Independence Fund Sitra, in Finland, has mediated innovation processes for more energy efficient buildings by facilitating
the piloting of new types of buildings and renovation models and by
aiming to create a market for these through influencing the making of
new policies. As another example, the Passive House Platform,
established with funding from the Flemish Agency for Innovation, in the
Netherlands, grouped together innovative companies in energy-efficient
housing. By intermediating between the companies with different skills
and capacities it enabled the creation of a system level innovation in passive house construction as a new commercial product produced jointly by the new network companies.
To
promote low energy innovation in building and refurbishment in order to
reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, we need to set up new
intermediary actors (politically and financially neutral bodies, energy
service companies with system focus, etc.) driving for change and to
empower existing actors to take on roles as low energy intermediaries.
Presently, many actors with power to influence the diffusion of low energy innovations, such as architects, have little interest in this.
Therefore, we are faced with two questions. How to interest more ‘low
energy intermediaries’ to come to operate in this field? And how to
strengthen the influence of existing and new intermediaries to
facilitate speedier change towards less energy consuming building stock?
The Centre for Innovation and Energy Demand will soon start a new
project to address these questions. In this project, CIED will explore
the roles of intermediaries in the UK housing and buildings sector and
draw from experiences reported elsewhere in Europe.
http://theenergycollective.com/sussexnrggroup/2229861/innovation-supporting-intermediaries-needed-advancing-low-energy-building-and