“Isolation is good, confining it sucks” is the provocative slogan by which the deputy Jean-Yves le Déaut and the senator Marcel Deneux – both members of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) – denounced the targeting of aid in renovation projects. In their opinion, current regulation does not promote innovations in energy saving in buildings.

They arrived at their conclusion after interviewing more than 170 professionals and studying the matter for more than a year. They depict the targeting of aid in renovation projects as opaque, too centralised and “living in complexity”. From several known cases, like the securities V affair (all the articles include the specific cases of the application of TR2012); they estimate that the current functioning of the administration is conducive to neither promptness nor efficiency.

Despite of the work achieved on the thermal regulations calculation in 2012 and published in 1377 pages in the official journal, the opponents are not convinced of the integration of innovative processes.

They underlined several weaknesses of these tools:

• greenhouse gases were not taken into account, nor active energy management;
• it was the same for geothermal, solar thermal collectors and dual-flow ventilation;
• the use of renewable energy has not been sufficiently identified.

The source of these wrong estimations and miscalculations is clearly pointed out: the Building Scientific and Technical Center (BSTC) with its unnecessarily long and expensive techniques. Le Déaut and Deneux denounce the vagueness surrounding the working methods of the BSTC which cannot, according to them, be both judge and jury.

They recommend that its role will be limited to standards development and then their verification will be entrusted to a third legally independent party – yet to be created.