FIEC PRESS RELEASE – 11/10/2012

Time to Seize the Potential of Saving Energy in Europe’s Buildings:

FIEC joins the Renovate Europe Campaign

Marking Renovate Europe Day, FIEC is proud to announce its membership of the Renovate Europe Campaign and once again emphasises that Europe’s buildings are key both to reducing energy demand, and thereby cutting emissions of climate changing greenhouse gases, but also, crucially, to helping to stimulate activity in a key sector of the economy through creating new, skilled employment to help sustain Europe’s future growth and competitiveness.

Speaking in the margins of the event held in Brussels to discuss how the EU and national governments can scale up renovation activities, FIEC Director General Ulrich Paetzold, spoke of the enormous potential of renovation activities; “the recent study compiled by Copenhagen Economics and unveiled today clearly shows that as much as €175 billion per year could flow into public coffers if the full potential of renovation activities is realised”. This is the clearest evidence yet that investment in existing buildings brings added value to the economy as a whole and can help generate additional revenue to national governments.

FIEC has consistently campaigned for the development of ambitious policies both at EU and national levels in order to promote renovation activities so that a real market can be developed in this area. Such ambition requires adequate large-scale financing instruments such as credit schemes and fiscal incentives but also non-financial barriers such as lack of awareness and lack of confidence in the market need to be tackled. In FIEC’s view one of the main ways of achieving this is ensuring that the energy performance certificate, mandatory under EU law, becomes a reliable tool for householders and businesses in assessing their building’s consumption of energy. Fiscal incentives and subsidy schemes should be made conditional on a demonstrable increase in the building’s certification rating. Furthermore, the emphasis of vocational training should be shifted to ensure that technologies linked to energy efficient building techniques are mainstreamed into curricula.

The Renovate Europe Campaign was created in 2011 in order for an ambitious roadmap to be drawn up on how to triple the annual renovation rate of the EU building stock from the current rate of 1% to 3% by 2020 and to ensure that the aggregate result of those renovations leads to an 80% reduction of the energy demand of the building stock by 2050 as compared to 2005. At present 23 companies and associations support the Renovate Europe Campaign.

More details of the Renovate Europe Campaign are available on the Campaign’s website:                                                         http://www.renovate-europe.eu/

⇒ FIEC is the European Construction Industry Federation, representing via its 33 national Member Federations in 29 countries (27 EU & EFTA, Croatia and Turkey) construction enterprises of all sizes, i.e. small and medium-sized enterprises as well as “global players”, carrying out all forms of building and civil engineering activities.

 
For further information, please contact Ulrich Paetzold
FIEC, Avenue Louise 225, BE-1050 Bruxelles
Tel. +32-2-514 55 35, Fax +32-2-511 02 76 e-mail: info@fiec.eu web: www.fiec.eu