Local governments in Albania and Kosovo now have access to comprehensive, practical guides to help them establish one-stop shop advisory services aimed at supporting residential energy renovation. Developed under the RenovAID project, the two new handbooks—Handbook on One-Stop Shops in Albania and Handbook on One-Stop Shops in Kosovo—provide step-by-step guidance on how to create effective OSS (One-Stop Shop) systems in the capitals of Tirana and Pristina.
The European Union has set the objective of climate neutrality by 2050, with an intermediate target in 2030 of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 55% compared to those of 1990. As highlighted in the Renovation Wave initiative of the European Green Deal, this objective for the residential sector means at least doubling the current rate of renovation, while significantly increasing the share of performing renovations and low energy (deep) renovations. Although technical solutions are known and available, intervention in the residential sector remains very complex, in particular due to the ownership structure of the building stock. 70 % of the EU population own the home they live in, while the remaining 30 % live in rental housing. Even for rental housing, the share of professional owners (housing companies, social housing operators) remains relatively small compared to individual owners. In Kosovo 97,8% live in their own flat or house, which means that, in the vast majority of cases, the decision to proceed with home energy renovation belongs to non-professional homeowners, who are usually insufficiently informed, unskilled for their role and/or lacking the time to manage an energy renovation project, which is rarely their main priority.
In order to upscale home energy renovation, public policies usually focus on boosting demand through awareness raising, mandatory requirements, or by providing public subsidies and low interest loans. However, given the lack of capacity of homeowners to cope with the complexity of low energy renovation, we postulate that home (low) energy renovation can only be upscaled if appropriate services are put in place on the supply side, in order to decrease the information and technical burden of renovation on homeowners. This handbook shows how the development of one-stop shops can provide a coordinated and coherent
response to the needs of homeowners at each step of their customer journey, in order to make the renovation process as painless as possible.
