EU awards €2.43 million grant for new project to move more affordable net-zero-energy housing renovations to the next stage of development and market uptake.
Giga Regio Factory is an innovative project that will build on, and develop links between, existing initiatives, including Energie Sprong, that are working to reduce the price and accelerate the take-up of high-quality, plug-and-play, prefabricated elements for net-zero-energy retrofit housing solutions. It has been awarded a Є2.43 million grant by the EU under its LIFE Programme.
The project will last for two-and-a-half years and will bring together twelve partners from four EU member states (France, Italy, Belgium and Germany). The partners have expertise in housing, energy, industrial processes, coaching, procurement and end-user expectations, and will work together to develop the market for net-zero-energy retrofit housing solutions that meet current and future trends and expectations.
The current slow pace of improving existing housing stock, coupled with the limited energy performance of existing retrofits, the connection of most new buildings to the fossil-fuel infrastructure and the use of carbon-intensive construction materials, has meant that greenhouse-gas emissions from buildings remain too high. There is a need to decarbonise existing buildings, which are responsible for 40% of energy consumption and 36% of greenhouse-gas emissions. These emissions could be reduced by either drastically reducing the demand for energy or by switching energy source, or by a combination of both, which is the only feasible and sensible means in most cases.
The Giga Regio Factory project recognises the need for a change of scale in order to target 10% of the market and one million homes renovated to a guaranteed zero-energy level in Europe by 2030. The project will use the robust set of concepts developed by Energie Sprong and will digitally aggregate renovation projects and use off-site manufacturing to bring customised, packaged, retrofit solutions to the market. The three Energie Sprong market development teams currently operating in France, Germany and Italy form the backbone of the Giga Regio Factory consortium, and they will be joined by partners in Belgium to scale-up the project there.
The project’s innovative approach will include developing an open-source tool for the energy classification of housing stock, and a smart aggregation strategy to launch large-scale, net-zero-energy retrofits. It will also include developing a total solution integrator accelerator, by coaching organisations that currently integrate and assemble industrial-scale solutions, so that they can respond to every request for offers. The project’s approach will also include the creation of a giga-factory kit to enable existing solution providers to scale-up their solutions to meet massive demand.
Further information: Rodrigo Arandi-Klee, Communication et Dissemination Manager
