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Comment by radicalbyte | Hacker News Reader

I'm from the EU: we could cut energy requirement for heating by 50% in a very short time just by properly insulating buildings. It's also rational to reduce the regulations blocking + further incentivise build out of wind/solar along with prolongation of existing nuclear where possible.

Lets do that instead of sucking yet more oil/gas out of the ground.

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How long would it take to properly insulate all the buildings that need to be heated but are inadequately insulated?

I have no idea what the situation is with availability of insulation contractors and supplies, but I'm guessing years? Certainly won't be possible by this winter.

Insulating a home does not give you a 50% reduction! It's closer to 15%.

You might get 50% on a leaky barn with zero insulation, but how many homes in Europe are like that?

(Note I'm not saying not to do this - certainly do this, just have proper expectations.)

Proper perfect brand new construction compared to 1950s worn out building might be 50% increase but that requires building a new building.

Add-on insulation can help but it’s much harder and not as great.

I achieved a 50% heating cost reduction after investing in the insulation of an older house. This included replacing the single pane glass.

Such properties are common over Europe; especially in properties built before the 1980s (which thank to the rebuild after WW2 are a decent percentage of all building stock).

Overall you'll maybe cut gas usage by 20% in 2-3 of years by insulating those buildings, building out renewable electricity with storage and incentivising heat pumps (which reduce/remove gas usage of resident-owned properties where they are viable).

Why wouldn't EU energy consumers have done that already if they can save that much money?

I suspect in many cases the energy consumer is not the building maintainer.

A huge amount of property is not owned by the energy consumer and the owners are not incentivised (or forced) to do it - so they don't. It's not a cash problem - the owners are earning exceptional returns at this time - it's a problem of poor regulation.

One fix would be to have the owner pay for heating/cooling costs of the structure. My apartment pays for the heating so as a result the place is very well insulated even though it is older.

I'll note that it's not always worth it to further insulate or replace functional though inefficient equipment. For example my apartment has an electric bill of about $50 a month, half of that is a fixed infrastructure cost. Even if I could bring my electric use to zero, it could at best save $25 a month. Replacing my AC with a more modern one could probably at best save $5 a month of that, taking many years to pay off even if you pay nothing for labor.

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