Ireland is nowhere near meeting its retrofit targets, a new report has warned.
The study by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) linked the widening gap between the State’s 2030 residential decarbonisation targets and the current out-turn to several factors including high costs, administrative complexity and information constraints.
It also highlighted a trade-off with the Government’s housing policy, noting deep retrofitting required labour and materials from the construction sector, which was currently at full capacity.
Ireland’s Climate Action Plan targets 500,000 residential retrofits and the deployment of 400,000 heat pumps, plus the delivery of up to 2.7 terawatt hours of district heating capacity by 2030.
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Assessing the latest data points, the ESRI said the State was “materially off-track” on all three targets.
By the end of 2024, the report noted that deep retrofits reached 57,932 (11.5 per cent of the target) while heat pump installations were estimated at 14,194 (3.5 per cent of the target).
“Linear projections based on post-pandemic trends imply that even continued acceleration leaves substantial shortfalls by 2030, with district heating similarly unlikely to meet targets,” it said.
The main barrier driving this underdelivery was cost. Using data from the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, the report noted the median (middle value) cost of a deep-energy retrofit ranges from €22,914 for an apartment to €66,503 for a detached house, with the portion of the cost covered by the homeowner ranging from €16,378 to €42,900.
The cost was even greater for rental properties.
Other barriers pinpointed included the potential disruption the building improvement can cause households and the complexity of the project, particularly in the case of old-age households.
A lack of practical information also emerges as a significant barrier to retrofitting, the report said. The potentially divergent incentives of landlords and tenants were also cited as a barrier.
In addition, the ESRI report highlighted some structural constraints facing the Government’s retrofit plan, suggesting 50,000 retrofits per year required 15,000 workers annually to carry out the required works.
This presented a challenge given the pressure to build new housing. “In the context of an acute housing shortage, and with delivery of new housing units falling short of recent targets, there is an immediate trade-off between upgrading existing homes to meet retrofit goals and building new homes to meet housing demand,” it said.
The report said that “measured decarbonisation” may be overstated because Ber (building energy rating) metrics can “diverge substantially from actual energy use”.
To accelerate retrofits, the report advocated several initiatives to get to hard-to-reach households and boost system-wide efficiencies.
“This review synthesises the empirical evidence on residential heat decarbonisation progress and challenges in Ireland,” Muireann Lynch of the ESRI said. “It highlights substantial shortfalls in delivery and discrepancies in performance metrics to date. In this context, additional policy measures may warrant consideration.”
