The director of the SEAI’s national retrofit scheme Ciaran Byrne has said that he hopes to see a doubling of the number of one-stop shops for retrofitting.
At present there are 20 one-stop shops, he told RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland. He wants to see double that figure by the end of this year, but there was “no upper limit”.
“We want to see as many as possible,” Mr Byrne said.
The one-stop shop mechanism aims to overcome complexities and difficulties faced by householders in sourcing funding. They are run by construction companies often working with energy providers, and assist in sourcing low-cost loans.
Mr Byrne said that, in some cases, if a one-stop shop were to work on a number of homes on the one street they could “aggregate” and reduced costs because they could buy materials in bulk.
At present there are waiting lists of 22 months for free upgrades for attic and wall insulation, part of this was due to delays because of Covid-19 because workers could not enter homes.
Mr Byrne hoped that the “significant funds” coming from the Government would drive down waiting lists.
There are plans to “ramp up” the number of homes being upgraded from 177 per month to over 400 per month, he added.
When asked about the position of people who were renting, Mr Byrne said that landlords could also benefit from upgrades and that if a minimum BER rating was introduced for rental properties that would drive landlords to get the work done.
Most of the retrofitting work could be done without requiring people to move out of their home, he explained when asked if this might lead to landlords getting tenants to leave.
