Energy consumption of households makes up around half of the total energy balance in Estonia. Large-scale building reconstruction is ahead, as more than half of Estonia’s building stock was built during the Soviet era. The new long-term strategy for the reconstruction of buildings sets the target to completely reconstruct the building stock to energy performance class C by 2050. The National Audit Office has stated that,  in order to achieve the goals set for improving energy efficiency, apartment buildings should be comprehensively reconstructed several times more than before in the following years. So far, the planned volume of reconstruction couldn’t be reached due to small state investment.

However, there are promising developments. A new initiative – the BuildEST project – is partnering with universities, ministries, and professional associations to reduce carbon emissions of the Estonian building stock and provide a national framework and starter mechanism for carrying out the EU Renovation Wave Initiative on a national level.