Samenvatting

The Netherlands is undergoing a massive (re)construction challenge. In addition to building new housing, a substantial part of the existing building stock of housing corporations is undergoing renovation. This renovation challenge has varying interactions with the energy transition, testified by the Dutch government’s ambitious target of connecting 200,000 buildings to fossil-free energy infrastructure (Rijksoverheid 2019). Improving the building quality, including the energy efficiency, of buildings, might reduce the overall energy consumption of households. Yet, a closer look at the interactions between renovation and energy are more instructive, as renovation is coupled with decisions regarding the energyuse and specifically heat-use of buildings. Renovation processes are a natural moment to take decisions regarding low-carbon heating: will houses and other buildings be renovated with an eye to district heating, or to supply their energy needs through electricity alone (or another solution altogether)? Such strategic decisions require coordination between decision-making processes at the level of building owners (such as households or housing corporations), municipalities, as well as energy infrastructure operators (such as heat companies or grid operators), all of which operate at different time scales. The importance of coordination becomes all the more salient given ambitious targets around renovation and energy transition set by the Government’s climate accords. In fact, according to the construction industry, such ambitions can only be reached through the implementation of new strategies for clustering and coordinating projects. A failure to coordinate might lead to failed business cases for district heating if renovation plans are more aligned with all-electric options, unnecessary costs for electricity grid reinforcement (if DH-connection would have reduced electricity consumption peaks) or grid congestion issues (if grid operators are unable to timely make the necessary investments in grid reinforcement), and incapacitate housing corporations from timely making the right decisions. A failure to coordinate renovation and energy transition successfully, in other words, will lead to an inefficient allocation of limited (human) resources, delays, and a potential cascade of other negative socio-economic and political consequences considering the salience of housing and energy costs as pivotal issues in the Dutch political landscape. The NWO-KIC funded PreMadona project aims to develop and interrogate a new digital ecosystem to enable renovation flow and clustering approaches proposed by the construction sector. These digital innovations are envisaged to help undertake this urban renovation and infrastructural challenge more efficiently, speedily, and intelligently, and are promoted by the building industry (Rovers and Tigchelaar 2024). PreMadona seeks to develop the required digital innovation, including by tackling sociotechnical challenges of data, trade-offs between context-awareness and collective optimisation, operational coordination, and the misalignment of technology and practice. Rather than developing technology alone, PreMadona simultaneously co-develops the digital innovation as well as the governance frameworks required for its proper implementation, in order to engender a properly embedded sociotechnical innovation.