The German city of Frankfurt am Main recently launched an online platform for the renovation of condominiums as part of the Interreg-NWE ACE-Retrofitting project.
The platform is strongly inspired by the successful collaborative web tool CoachCopro developed by the Paris Climate Agency in 2005. Complex decision-making process, legislation, lack of technical and financial advice, confusing market offers and subsidy schemes: these are some of the challenges faced by condominiums considering an energy retrofit.
In Frankfurt, 28% of the housing units are condominiums, and 20% in Germany. By extrapolating, one can estimate that over 200,000 residents in Frankfurt and ca. 15 million residents in Germany could benefit from the information and tools provided by the platform to support energy retrofit in condominiums.
An online platform to provide independent and unbiased advice
With its online platform, Frankfurt brings together the most relevant information on condominium energy retrofit: information around the different steps of such a project as well as key facts and figures to emphasise its economic and climate change-related benefits. The web tool therefore allows residents and co-owners to undertake an energy retrofit in full knowledge of the issues entailed, by providing concrete recommendations.
An online platform to support the networking of the various stakeholders
Among the resources provided by the platform, a list of building professionals is available. By using this free tool, stakeholders will easily have an overview of local qualified building advisors, sort them according to their fields of expertise and find their contact information.
From the supply side, the building professionals will also benefit from the platform. Condominium energy retrofitting is a tedious task according to most of them: “A lot of time is invested in projects that fail due to the complicated condominium decision-making processes”* [translated from German by Energy Cities]. The list enables those professionals to be referenced in a free and easy-to-fill database and to benefit from the city’s promotion, so that they will easily find new customers.
The city of Frankfurt made the online platform’s information readily accessible to all stakeholders concerned by the condominiums energy retrofit issue and, for example, developed a glossary to translate technical language in laymen’s terms.
To learn more, visit Frankfurt’s “SanierungsWEGweiser” online platform!
| Key facts and figures about the platform |
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Contact
Jonas Geissler (ACE-Retrofitting project manager, Energy Department of the city of Frankfurt):
jonas.geissler [at] stadt-frankfurt.de
* Source: DDIVaktuell, https://archiv.ddiv.de/blog/die-quote-muss-steigen