The cabinet has great ambitions to make houses more sustainable more quickly in order to become less dependent on Russian gas. Too big, according to the Economics Institute for Construction, an important research bureau.
The cabinet makes up to and including 2030 4 billion euros free to insulate 2.5 million homes. “We will not achieve that pace in the next few years,” EIB director Taco van Hoek told news hour† “We want too much, too soon.”
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The cabinet mainly wants to tackle poorly insulated homes with orange and red energy labels. Since the floors and cavity walls are filled with insulating material, it can be done quite quickly, according to Van Hoek. “But if everything has to be very high-quality, from very inefficient homes to label B so that you can also switch to gas-free, that would be too big a task.”
The biggest bottleneck is the shortage of construction workers, says Van Hoek. “The number of gas-free homes must be increased and 100,000 homes must also be built per year, instead of the current 70,000. Not all of that will work within a few years.”
‘High energy prices advantage’
Moreover, the billions released by the cabinet only cover a small part of the costs, says Van Hoek. Through subsidy schemes homeowners and landlords will soon be able to request a discount. “Small-scale insulation activities cost about 2000 euros per home. But with more radical activities you are talking about 20,000 euros per home. Then 4 billion is perhaps 10 percent of the total costs.”
The EIB figured rather that making homes natural gas-free is going more slowly than expected. The director also warns that the isolation scheme “needs time”. “People have to decide for themselves whether they want to insulate. And we know from experience that even people for whom it could be profitable, by no means all do it. People usually only start insulating when they want to replace it, not when they have just left the ceiling. pieces.”
“The good news is that everything has its downside: the high energy prices mean that it is becoming more attractive for private individuals to carry out insulation activities.”
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