Employment Impacts of a Large-Scale Deep Building Energy Retrofit Programme in Poland

the goal of the present research is to gauge the net employment impacts of a large-scale, deep building energy-efficiency renovation programme in Poland, in the understanding that the low employment rate of the Polish economy makes this a key entry point for decision-making. The study has been commissioned by the European Climate Foundation, and executed by an international team of experts led by the Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy (3CSEP) of the Central European University.

The employment impacts strongly correlate with the dynamics of the investments flowing towards building energy retrofits. Therefore the study has investigated the impact of specific renovation scenarios characterized by two factors: the type or depth of retrofits and the speed or implementation rate assumed (for an overview of the scenario descriptions see Table 1). The focus was on existing residential and public sector buildings, and emphasised scenarios that support deep retrofits, which bring the buildings as close to passive house standards (i.e., a consumption of 15 kWh/m2/year for space heating and cooling) as realistically and economically feasible (S-DEEP scenarios). Other two scenarios – the business-as-usual implementation of the Thermo-modernization programme (S-BASE) and an improved version of the former (S-SUB) – were also examined for comparative purposes.