Green homes, Italy is already halfway to the 2030 target

A heavy, but not unsustainable commitment. Meeting the targets set by the green homes directive until 2035 will cost between euro 12 and 14 billion per year. An effort that will serve to maintain a renovation rate between 1.2 and 1.4% every twelve months. But which will have a major impact in terms of employment effects. Until 2030 alone, the plan, which Italy must approve in its final version by the end of 2026, will be able to generate a total of over 1.3 million jobs.

These are some of the results of the first research study by the Italian Surveyors Foundation, curated by the Centro Studi Cgia di Mestre and Studio Sintesi and presented yesterday in Rome at the Chamber of Deputies, to analyse the prospects and impacts of the Energy performance of buildings directive (Epbd), better known as the Green House directive. This is an epoch-making challenge for the sector, with targets that go up to 2050, but also a great opportunity for the entire construction chain, starting with technical professionals.

A challenge in which Italy is not starting behind. The season of the superbonus, criticised and difficult to sustain for public accounts, has however certainly had the positive effect of bringing important results in terms of efficiency of our building heritage: to measure the directive's objectives, in fact, the counts start from 2020, including how much was spent on the former 110 per cent. Thus, the research explains that, thanks to energy efficiency works carried out in the period 2020-2024, Italy has already achieved a 9.1 per cent reduction in consumption.

With respect to this figure, we need to take a step back. The directive imposes a cut in the average consumption of the residential building stock of 16% by 2030 and 20-22% by 2035: member countries are free to determine, with their renovation plans, how they will achieve this target. By 2050, then, the building stock must be low-consumption and zero-emission. Compared to the 16 per cent cut planned by 2030, then, a residual 6.9 per cent remains. We are already more than halfway there.

But what is needed to achieve this goal? The residential stock - the study recalls - consists of 12.4 million buildings and 35.3 million housing units, 73% of which are permanently occupied. This is an ageing heritage; there are approximately 24 million dwellings built before 1980, representing 68.3% of the total residential stock. By 2030, to complete the work imposed by the directive, it will be necessary to renovate three million dwellings, i.e. just over 500,000 per year, with an average intervention cost of 28,000 euros. In total, the investments to be activated are 84.8 billion euro, i.e. about 14.1 billion per year. A high figure, but not out of scale for our public accounts. To make a comparison, the ecobonus is worth about EUR 5.8 billion of investments each year, whereas the superbonus weighed in at a much higher figure of about EUR 40 billion in 2023 alone.