Energy Efficiency in Existing Building: investment gap, incentives and supporting measures
This PhD dissertation focuses on energy efficiency policies in housing. It aims at evaluating the effectiveness of public incentives designed to increase household's investment in energy efficiency of their dwelling. To reach this objective this research combines the two key dimensions of ex-post evaluation, i.e. summary and formative dimensions. The first one aims at knowing the effectiveness of public policies whereas the other one targets to understand what the public policies' consequences are and to identify ways for improvement. To reach this purpose, the research follows four steps. Firstly, it requires a detailed analysis to understand the origins of the energy efficiency gap. This gap can be explained by markets failures, consequences of bounded rationality and coordination problem between stakeholders, especially in multi-family dwellings. Secondly, the argument progresses by drawing a parallel between results from normative analysis and from observations of actual level of investments in thermal retrofit actions. It aims at identifying investment households' criteria and then at understanding how barriers to energy efficiency raise. Thirdly, thanks to the inventory of these various energy efficiency barriers it becomes possible to examine if the incentives currently implemented in France can remove them all. It appears that the national policy does not significantly reduce the energy efficiency gap. On the one hand, some barriers remain because no tool has been proposed to overcome them. On the other hand, some barriers are only partially eliminated because the practical use of tools differs from their theoretical design. Finally, using the analysis of retrofitting programs implemented on the Grenoble area this research assesses the effectiveness of additional incentives. The objective is to know to what extent these "reinforced" policies remove barriers still existing after national tools implementation. From these four successive analyses - causes, appearance of the energy efficiency gap, national tools, programs implemented at the local level - we conclude to a necessary strengthening of non-financial measures which support agents to initiate an investment dynamic and in the meanwhile to an increase of the reliability of economic tools, such as taxes or subventions.