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EPBD and poverty: from threat to opportunity

Panel: 5B. Cutting the energy use of buildings: Policy and programmes

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Authors:
François Grevisse, Belgium
Marie Brynart, Sustainable Energy Services SCRL, Belgium

Abstract

The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive is sometimes perceived as a threat to social justice, generating new obligations and new costs. In the medium to long term, the EPBD could however provide leverage to alleviate energy poverty, through new instruments that probably still have to be tamed.

This paper presents and analyses the perceived and anticipated consequences of the EPBD in Belgium in terms of social justice. Based on the consultation of a hundred actors (104 participants) of social issues related to energy in Belgium, the paper draws conclusions from 3 different transpositions of the EPBD (related to the 3 Belgian regions), highlighting and analysing threats and opportunities.

The EPBD generates new obligations and new costs, which are usually more difficult to meet when the housing is inefficient and/or is owned or rented by vulnerable households. On the one hand, this could hinder the refurbishment of housing for poor households (or possibly lead these households to illegality) whereas those requirements should help to reduce the energy expenditure of other households. One might therefore consider that it increases the poverty gap. And on the other hand, vulnerable households could encounter short-term and mid-term financial trouble as soon as they are forced to meet energy performance requirements.

The EPBD is however supposed to reduce energy expenditure, and could thus contribute to alleviate energy poverty. Certification could for example allow better housing choice, leading to a reduced global housing cost (including energy costs). In principle, such an instrument could be valuable for vulnerable households, although this is currently difficult to achieve for them.

This raises 2 major questions. Firstly, how to open to vulnerable households the access to the benefits of the EPBD? And secondly, how to neutralize threats or turn them into opportunities?

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