The FACTORENO project has officially launched its mission to tackle one of Europe’s most pressing climate challenges: the low rate and high fragmentation of energy retrofits in the private residential sector. Project partners gathered in Brussels from 20-21 October for a two-day kick-off meeting to establish the operational roadmap for scaling deep residential building renovations across Europe.

Buildings are currently responsible for approximately 40% of final energy consumption and 36% of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions across the European Union. Despite ambitious European climate targets, deep renovation rates remain below the threshold needed to achieve climate neutrality. FACTORENO directly addresses this gap by introducing a systemic, scalable solution designed to unlock large-scale, cost-efficient retrofits while catalysing the transformation required by the EU’s Renovation Wave and the recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD).

Introducing the “Renovation Factory Enabler” and RIUs

At the core of the project is the concept of the “Renovation Factory Enabler” – a regional operating system engineered to bridge the gap between fragmented supply chains and aggregated public demand.

FACTORENO brings together public authorities, financial institutions, energy agencies, One-Stop Shops (OSS), and construction SMEs through collaborative governance structures called Regional Integration Units (RIUs). RIUs act as regional orchestrators, streamlining industrialised renovation processes, de-risking private investment, and driving predictable market momentum.

The consortium and regional pilots

Led by project coordinator CLIMACT, the FACTORENO consortium combines multi-disciplinary expertise across energy planning, technical standardisation, policy design, and community engagement. The consortium leverages the specialised technical and market expertise of Buildwise and Ressorts to develop standardised retrofit toolkits and typology methodologies, while FEDARENE drives the design and prototype of the RIUs and the project’s EU-wide outreach.

The project’s Regional Integration Units will be piloted across five diverse European territories:

Each pilot region represents distinct building stock characteristics, climate zones, and local governance structures, ensuring that the resulting RIU blueprints can be replicated across other European regions.

From European Strategy to On-the-Ground Action

To complement strategic discussions during the kick-off meeting, the consortium participated in an immersive field visit to the Cité Jardin de La Roue in Anderlecht, Brussels.

This site visit provided first-hand insights into resident-led, neighbourhood-scale renovations. It demonstrated how technical innovation, such as external bio-based insulation and circular building materials, can be combined with citizen mobilisation and local governance. Seeing these neighborhood retrofits in action reinforced the principles underlying FACTORENO: aggregated, human-centered demand is essential for successful, large-scale decarbonisation.

FACTORENO is co-funded by the European Union under the LIFE Clean Energy Transition (LIFE CET) programme under Grant Agreement No. 101295400. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or CINEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.