Energy and social justice: making renovation possible
I have just published a policy paper on La Grande Conversation, the journal of Terra Nova, on the obstacles blocking home energy renovation in France — and the ways to lift them.
My warm thanks to Marc-Olivier Padis and Nicolas Goldberg for their careful readings and suggestions, which enriched this work.
Terra Nova and La Grande Conversation
Terra Nova is an independent progressive think tank, founded in 2008, which produces public policy notes and reports on the ecological transition, democracy, the economy and social affairs. It is one of the main think tanks of France’s reformist left.
La Grande Conversation is Terra Nova’s intellectual and political journal, published online. It hosts analyses by specialists, researchers and practitioners on the major debates of the moment — ecological transition, social justice, the economy, democracy — in an accessible format, between the research note and the press article.
The argument: why renovation is stalling, and how to fix it
83% of French people consider energy renovation a priority. Only 37% are considering doing works. This paradox is not a matter of conviction: households know they should renovate. It is the concrete conditions that stand in the way.
I start from a structural observation: energy renovation is an infrastructure of the transition, not an optional investment. As such, it cannot rest solely on households’ decisions and financial capacity. The state must lift three locks that paralyse the move to action.
Lock no. 1: the cash advance. Renovating means committing money now to save it later. Public support schemes (MaPrimeRénov’, eco-loans) reduce the final out-of-pocket cost, but households must advance the funds before receiving them. For modest households, tenants or co-owners, this pre-financing requirement is often insurmountable. The answer: near-zero-rate public third-party financing, carried by a public bank, which pays for the works directly and repays itself from the energy savings achieved.
Lock no. 2: performance risk. The savings promised at the quotation stage are never guaranteed. If the works are poorly sized or the building behaves differently from forecasts, the household bears the gap. This uncertainty is discouraging, especially for households that cannot afford bad surprises. The answer: performance guarantees over twenty-five to thirty years, carried by renovation operators, transferring the outcome risk from the resident to the professional.
Lock no. 3: the disconnect between who decides and who pays. Tenants pay the energy bills but cannot authorise works in their home — the owner decides. Fragile co-ownerships — around 110,000 in France, many of them concentrating thermal sieves — are structurally incapable of voting for and financing major renovations: insufficient cash, blocking majority rules, failing governance. The answer: direct financing to co-ownership syndicates, allowing collective paralysis to be bypassed, and savings-sharing mechanisms that protect tenants against post-renovation rent increases.
These proposals are not theoretical: they build on existing schemes, in France and in Northern Europe, which show that large-scale renovation is possible when financial risk and the cash advance stop weighing on households alone. It is a question of financing architecture, not willpower.