Germany has pioneered the world's largest building retrofit programme using vacuum insulation panels — installing super-thin vacuum-core thermal insulation on the exterior walls of 85,000 old apartment buildings across Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich, achieving 80 percent reductions in heating energy demand while adding only 3 centimetres to wall thickness.

 

Germany has pioneered the world's largest building retrofit programme using vacuum insulation panels — installing super-thin vacuum-core thermal insulation on the exterior walls of 85,000 old apartment buildings across Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich, achieving 80 percent reductions in heating energy demand while adding only 3 centimetres to wall thickness.

Vacuum insulation panels achieve thermal resistance 8 to 10 times greater than equivalent-thickness conventional mineral wool insulation by evacuating air from a rigid microporous core sealed between aluminium foil membranes. The resulting insulation performs at 0.007 watts per metre-kelvin — approaching the thermal performance of a vacuum flask — from a panel only 30 millimetres thick. Germany's pre-1980 apartment stock has average wall insulation equivalent to a single brick, representing the largest single energy waste source in the German building economy.

Average apartment heating energy drops from 180 kilowatt-hours per square metre annually to 36 kilowatt-hours, meeting Germany's near-zero-energy building standard without demolition. The programme creates 42,000 permanent specialist installation jobs and reduces Germany's residential heating gas demand by 3.2 billion cubic metres annually.

Source: German Energy Agency dena, Bavarian State Ministry of Housing, European Commission Renovation Wave Programme, 2025

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