Old electric-powered heat emitters.
Walls with hardly any insulation.
Damp throughout the ground floor.
Sweden, for instance, often does very well in such analyses.
But for Magnus Petersson, cofounder and chief executive of Stockholm-basedDryft, theres plenty of work still to do.
We need to fundamentally transform the houses, he says.
Petersson and his fellowcofoundersnoticed rising demand for home retrofits around 2019.
That demand has only rocketed since because ofenergy price rises due to Russias invasion of Ukraine.
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Where would a homeowners cash best be spent?
The company currently covers the Greater Stockholm area but has plans to expand acrossEurope.
Since 2020, Dryft has carried out renovation projects large and small in nearly 6,000 homes.
Petersson explains how the firms algorithm estimates the projected energy savings post-renovation.
As an example, he shares a case study of a 1970-built, four-bedroom house in Stockholm.
At that rate, it will take about 12-13 years to recoup the investment.
Show me the money
Theres no doubt that extensive energy retrofits are not cheap.
A virtual retrofit before you decide on the real thing.
The tool proposes energy renovation interventions that might be suitable for a given dwelling.
These suggestions can be followed up with an on-site survey to get formal quotations for specific works.
Those initial enquiries have resulted in a total of 2,400 surveys of properties to date.
But they are just one slice of the pie.
What about the big businesses that construct large residential developments, or social housing providers?
In the UK,Hubbis targeting such organisations.
The company has its own software that creates a digital twin of a specific property.
Hubbs machine learning system can then model how to make each dwelling more energy efficient.
And this could apply to existing properties requiring a retrofit, too.
Doing it at scale would in principle cut down local energy demand drastically.
