T e c h n o l o g i c a l D i m e n s i o n
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housing providers and their associated, to remove the various obstacles encountered in
implementing strategic actions for energy efficiency. The project, involving 4 European
countries (Italy, France, Germany and Bulgaria), has identified and analyzed the
obstacles by developing a series of "recommendations" and a practical guide based on
practical experiments.
Another interesting project (currently underway) is CASH Cities Action for Sustainable
Housing (part of the URBACT program). The ambition of the CASH project is to propose
new solutions and promote new policies for the sustainable renovation of social and
affordable housing units in the European Union. CASH is a network of 11 partners (10
cities and one region) led by Echirolles City. As a contribution to Climate Change issue,
the network seeks to reduce the energy consumption of buildings and in buildings. It
looks for new solutions to renovate social and affordable housing units, in order to
improve their energy efficiency (EE) and to influence users’ behavior through citizens’
involvement.
An important project is the Power House Europe. The Power House Europe project, The
Big Housing and Energy Exchange is one of the actions by the European Commission
concerning the promotion of energy saving in the civil sector and has the objectives: to
disseminate the results of the IEE program (Intelligent Energy Europe) and to achieve
exchange of experiences on upgrading the energy efficiency of social housing,
leveraging the enormous building potential offered by organizations operating in Europe
in this field.
The project aims both to analyze and make available to operators of European countries
the tools developed under the projects financed by the European Commission, is to
network all the experiences and facilitate exchanges through a dedicated website.
The dissemination activities is mainly based on the creation, in each participating
country, a national platform that will allow the comparison with the largest possible
number of national operators in this sector.
The project is coordinated by CECODHAS Housing Europe, European Committee for
Coordination of social housing, which brings together 46 national and regional
associations representing more than a total of 22,000 social housing organizations in 19
European countries, offering more than 21 million housing.
Are also mentioned fundamental researches and experimentations (the last two
decades) as the protocol HQE2R: Towards a method for the recovery of sustainable
neighborhoods, conducted by the CSTB (Centre Scientifique et Tecnique du Batiment-
France), and the creation of the district Ecolonia in Holland with the contribution of
Novem (National Agency for Energy).
In conclusion only a heritage building "appropriate" and with a conscious use of energy
by users will be able to provide a real contribution to energy savings that can be
transformed into poverty reduction induced by the energy bill.
(1)
Domestic energy poverty refers to a situation where a household does not have access or
cannot afford to have the basic energy or energy services to achieve day to day living
requirements. These requirements can change from country to country and region to region. The
most common needs are lighting, cooking energy, domestic heating or cooling.
There is little information available on specific measure on the basic energy requirement, but
many countries have identified that provision of 1 unit of electricity per day per household as a
basic energy requirement.[citation needed], thus it is seen that in many developing countries the
30 units of electricity per month category is provided at a very concessionary rate.
Until recently energy poverty definitions took only the minimum energy quantity required in to
consideration when defining energy poverty, but a different school of thought is that not only
energy quantity but the quality and cleanliness of the energy used should be taken in to
consideration when defining energy poverty.
(2)
Source Cecodhas. Established in 1988, CECODHAS Housing Europe is the European
Federation of Public, Cooperative & Social Housing Altogether they manage over 27 million
homes, about 12% of existing dwellings in the EU.
