Tribune. Despite unanimity in favor of rapid and massive thermal renovation of housing, the measures taken in August 2021, which set the rules for the coming years for donors, are unsuitable. Based on the diagnosis of energy performance without correcting bias, they miss part of their objectives.
Undertaken in 2017, work on the energy renovation plan resulted in the Climate and Resilience Law, promulgated on August 22, 2021, which has effects for all dwellings whose class, calculated by the energy performance diagnosis (DPE), is considered bad. For the 12 million housing units in the rental stock, the DPE classes, expressed in kWh / m2 and in CO2/ m2, now determine a criterion of “decency” which will lead, for classes E to G, to prohibit them from being rented between 2025 and 2035.
Price effects
The law sets the rules for the next thirteen years for around 7 million rental units deemed to be inefficient. The significant economic impact is in reality instantaneous, with an immediate discount in the appreciation, over the long term, of their value (price, yield, etc.). While energy performance previously had little impact on transactions and leases, it has – and will – now have an effect on prices.
The interest of a general text with precise deadlines is obvious. However, methodological problems thwart the whole system and reduce its effectiveness. The change in the method of calculating DPE classes, effective since 1er July 2021, made it possible to put an end to a significant distortion, which had persisted since its creation fifteen years ago, by neutralizing the housing occupancy factor. But the revised and corrected DPE still has major methodological biases.
Established exclusively on the basis of the physical parameters of housing, the “new DPE” still conceals two essential defects having a substantial impact. The first flaw is as much political as it is methodological: for all homes heated by electricity, the classification is overwhelmingly carried out on the basis of the kWh / m ratio.2, without the CO2/ m2 have a real influence on the now discriminating criterion of “decency”.
For electricity, we can thus have a bad energy class F or G, associated with a favorable climatic class C or even B. Electric “thermal strainers” therefore emitting little CO2, which will be subject to rental prohibition measures, with all their economic consequences (valuation, work to be carried out, yield, etc.), according to an energy criterion that supplants the climate.
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