The government’s strategy for renovating Poland’s aging building stock remains a pipe dream, even if the country could save up to €17 bn by 2050 with a proper renovation plan.
Twenty-one percent of households in Poland are struggling with energy poverty, while two-thirds of buildings in the country are old and lacking proper insulation, according to the Polish edition of the Velux Healthy Homes Barometer, presented in Warsaw.
According to the report, about 9.4 mn Poles currently live in housing conditions that pose a risk to their health – with inadequate heating, indoor air pollution, and mould combined to create an environment favourable to health conditions like asthma.
“The energy market crisis, including the heating prices, shows how big a challenge it is for Poland,” says Katarzyna Przybylska, an energy poverty specialist from the Habitat for Humanity Poland Foundation.” Przybylska defines energy poverty as a phenomenon where a household cannot be heated up in winter or cooled down in summer to maintain a temperature suitable for living.
According to her, energy poverty in Poland is likely to increase because of the ongoing gas crisis caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine. “We have reached a point where this problem cannot be avoided. It is essential to implement measures that will reduce and eliminate this problem,” she said.
Energy poverty is highly correlated to economic poverty. In Poland, it is statistically more common in rural areas, even though the problem also affects big cities. “Some 10% of people living in the largest cities of over 500,000 residents are also struggling with this problem,” Przybylska said.
“This is due to the fact that the buildings in which they live are sometimes not connected to the heating networks, and sometimes they are in very poor technical condition. In such situations, the heat escapes through leaky windows and uninsulated walls, and then you have to turn on the heater even more,” she explained.
A common solution to that problem is boosting energy efficiency and building insulation. Europe’s building sector today is responsible for 40% of energy consumption and 36% of CO2 emissions. In Poland, 65% of buildings are over 30 years old, and many were built in the communist era when construction standards were low.
To improve energy efficiency, the government adopted a “long-term building renovation strategy” in February 2022, linked to the country’s National Recovery Plan (NRP) adopted in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. The Polish strategy assumes a thermal renovation of about 3.8% of buildings per year – or about 236,000 per year in the current decade.
For Poland, the benefits of renovating the building stock are potentially massive. According to the Healthy Homes Barometer, the economic benefits for Poland are chiefly related to lower energy poverty. But the cumulative benefits go beyond this and have positive effects on health, with fewer problems linked to poor air quality in buildings, which cause moisture and fungus on the walls, lack of daylight, excessive noise or insufficient ventilation. The report found that the cumulative benefits for Poland amount to €17 bn by 2050.