Initially launched by GGGI, the project is now being implemented under the leadership of GIZ, in partnership with the Ministry of Construction and Urban Development of Mongolia and the Ulaanbaatar Mayor’s Office. It focuses on thermo-technical retrofitting of panel apartment buildings constructed between 1962 and 2000, which house over 20% of the city’s population.

The innovative intervention incorporates a mixing loop system, dynamically adjusting indoor temperatures based on external conditions, thus obviating the need to open windows when it gets too hot. While initially, the financial burden fell on homeowners, GGGI facilitated investment by monetizing energy savings, with an estimated payback period of 10 years. Given that 30% of Ulaanbaatar’s buildings face similar challenges, such retrofitting not only extends their lifespan but also promises a healthier and more sustainable future for the city.

The project envisions transforming the residential building sector in Mongolia to be energy efficient and facilitating implementation of the NDC targets.

– The project seeks to Jump-start a large-scale Thermo-Technical Retrofitting (TTR) program and create market conditions for mobilizing energy efficiency investments.

– The project consists of Technical Cooperation (TC) and Financial Cooperation (FC) to break the deadlock of financing Mongolia’s residential building energy efficiency.

– The FC component introduces the Energy Efficiency Fund (EEF) with a revolving nature to mobilize funding from public and private sectors and scale up the residential retrofitting.

Mongolia’s annual per capita GHG emissions are higher than in other developing countries.

The building sector accounts for 11% of these emissions through heat and electricity consumption, which is higher than that of the transport and industrial sectors. One of the main reasons is the country’s low energy efficiency (EE), particularly in the built environment and old pre-cast buildings. These dominate the building stock in Ulaanbaatar (UB), the world’s coldest capital, where half of the country’s population lives. Approximately 20% of the population lives in precast apartments, which represents 30% of the city’s building inventory.

The project intends to achieve four key outcomes:

Outcome 1: To encourage a policy change, shifting the heat tariff toward the market-rate and consumption-based in order to provide greater incentives to invest in heat-saving technologies.

Outcome 2: The establishment of a revolving Building Energy Efficiency Fund (BEEF) will help finance the upfront costs of retrofitting while enabling households to repay a share of the costs over the longer term through monetized energy savings. The fund and financing mechanisms for refurbishment during and after the project will be operational. The BEEF is designed for long-term operations and will be replenished through on-bill repayments and monetized energy savings from the TTR. Collected funds will be reinvested in further TTRs of precast panel buildings.

Outcome 3: With the initial investment of the project at least 375 precast panel building blocks will be retrofitted.

Outcome 4: Awareness raising and information campaigns to create healthy demand from residents for energy thermo-technical retrofitting measures.