Can we talk about energy efficiency in housing without talking about artificial intelligence? While AI is everywhere: smartphones, offices, mobility, its deployment in housing, although a major source of energy savings, remains surprisingly timid. It is time to correct this asymmetry.
When public authorities legislate on the performance of buildings, they target the tertiary sector. The tertiary decree sets ambitious reduction targets, and the BACS (Building Automation & Control System) decree imposes automated control systems in large non-residential buildings. In short: the law organizes “intelligent sobriety” in offices and businesses. For the residential stock, nothing comparable: it remains the great forgotten part of this logic.
This is strategic nonsense: in 2024, buildings represented 43% of French energy consumption, of which 28% comes from the residential sector and 15% from the tertiary sector. To achieve our climate objectives, housing must no longer be the poor relation of regulation.
Get rid of the user’s guilt
For a long time, energy policies have been based on a paradigm that has become obsolete: appealing to individual responsibility by asking users to make “efforts”. Current solutions (connected thermostats, smart meters, monitoring applications) are only visualization tools that require action from the user: “I turn it down, I turn it off, I shift it”. This approach has reached its limits. It imposes too heavy a mental load to remain effective over time.
Conversely, the automation imposed in the tertiary sector shows that the occupant must be relieved. A recent study demonstrates that global connected control (managing heating, hot water, shutters room by room via AI) allows up to 30% energy savings per year, without degrading comfort. AI
thus allows you to move from “experienced” sobriety to “controlled” sobriety, fluid and invisible. It’s time to offer households the same level of performance.
Towards a frugal AI that is useful and linked to the climate
An objection often comes up: AI consumes energy, particularly via data centers, whose electricity demand could more than double by 2030. The challenge is not to put AI everywhere, but to deploy “frugal AI”, as defined by ADEME, where its “ecological return on investment” is positive. This involves favoring systems that process data in the home and limit exchanges with the cloud, rather than multiplying energy-intensive services of little utility. When computing power can save thousands of kilowatt hours in millions of homes, AI becomes a tool of sovereignty and not a gadget.
Let us give ourselves the means to achieve our ambitions
While Emmanuel Macron announced 109 billion euros of investment in AI, housing cannot be excluded from this strategy. Three directions can structure a proactive policy: integrating intelligent management requirements into new construction, improving
aid for renovation when simple management solutions are installed and launch large-scale pilot programs in social housing and fragile co-ownerships to combat energy poverty.
To deploy these solutions, public authorities must support French and European players in the sector, so that the technologies deployed in housing are designed and mastered here. Technologically, we are ready: the bricks already exist to secure, assist and
automate part of housing uses. Putting them at the service of lowering bills and improving household comfort is the next step in sustainably improving the quality of life. Making housing a field of excellence for useful and sober AI is a social and ecological emergency, but also a choice of sovereignty.
