Energy efficient renovation of multi-apartment buildings: Management, economic and engineering aspects

The article analyses the results of the 2016–2023 national programme of multi-apartment building renovation in Latvia, being importantly co-financed by ERDF, and there was used the publicly available database of this programme implementation, as of 31st December 2023. This was complementary analysed during the six deep semi-structured interviews with main stakeholders and experts at the municipal level particularly. Valmiera city and county municipality was chosen for a case study as one of the most pro-energy active municipalities in the country, having developed and introduced a complementary set of energy governance instruments. The challenges are particularly related to the management and economic aspects and their interconnection with engineering ones as being identified. Within 2016–2023 in total around 22.8 thousand apartments (over 620 buildings) are renovated at national scale, however that is only around 4% of the total number of apartments. The planned thermal energy savings constitute around 0.9% of the total final energy consumption of the household sector in Latvia as being the high impact. High energy efficiency for heating is achieved in the renovated buildings (after renovation, the “B” energy efficiency class is achieved on average), however, the low number of renovated buildings still limits the impact of the programme. The renovation projects have a long (around 30 years in average) payback period, if compared with the actual district heating tariffs, thus, such renovation is hardly possible without the public grant part. Particularly, for completed projects in 2023 the specific costs significantly increase. The renovation of apartment buildings is analysed in the context of the energy citizenship (ENCI) concept. About 60% of building renovation are carried out by the legal institutional forms established by apartment owners, particularly, housing associations registered as NGOs. During the renovation of buildings, zero-emission decentralized energy production technologies are not installed until now, only few examples can be noted. Although the requirements of this renovation programme allowed, it could be assumed that the overall management and economic conditions were not enough attractive for the promotion of pro-sumerism for households or organizations to practice both — produce and consume energy.