Social housing energy retrofitting: Business Model and supporting tools for public administration

High refurbishment costs and uncertainty of the investment payback period account as the main reasons of low rate of energy retrofit of the European building stock. Moreover, assessing energy and economic benefits of energy retrofitting may result difficult e.g. due to the unpredictability of users' behaviour which may alter the effectiveness of energy refurbishment intervention. This paper deals with the question whether approaches exist, aimed at securing the profitability of energy retrofitting and at creating the market condition to incentivize the energy refurbishment on a large scale. The paper presents the operational tools, developed to support the public administrations along the entire retrofit process, and the Business Model (BM), structured to financially support the refurbishments by the energy cost savings. This tools and the BM has been developed for the South Tyrolean context, to promote the energy retrofit of the social housing building stock of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano. The results presented in this paper are part of the ongoing research project "KlimaKit", founded by operational programme European Fund for Regional Development of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano EFRD 2014-2020 - Investments in Growth and Employment.