02/25/25 Buildings Redesigning buildings and areas

Serial prefabricated building refurbishment as a blueprint for the heating transition in existing buildings

dena team leader Nico Gorsler explains the latest developments

Premiere in Brandenburg

In the medium-sized town of Ludwigsfelde in Brandenburg, one of the first WBS 70 prefabricated buildings in Germany is currently being refurbished in series. The project could become a blueprint for the rapid, economical and tenant-friendly refurbishment of large prefabricated housing stock in Germany and Eastern Europe. Nico Gorsler, Team Leader Construction and Housing Industry at the dena Competence Centre for Serial Refurbishment / Energiesprong DE, explains the current developments.

The 102-metre-long, five-storey building block at Albert-Schweitzer-Straße 2-14 will have a new building envelope made from 228 prefabricated timber façade elements, which will be prefabricated in the factory, including thermal insulation, triple-glazed windows and a fibre cement surface, and then simply assembled on site. The 82 tenants will remain in their flats during the renovation work, which will last until April 2025. As the work can be carried out quickly on site and the intervention in the flats is minimal, serial refurbishments can be carried out while the tenants are still living there. The municipal housing association ‘Märkische Heimat’ in Ludwigsfelde is investing around 6.7 million euros in the project.

Arbeiter in Hebebühnen montieren neue Fassadenplatten an einem Wohngebäude.

Net zero on the balance sheet

Like most prefabricated buildings, the block in Ludwigsfelde is also connected to the public district heating network, which is currently still largely based on fossil fuels. An 82 kWp photovoltaic system on the roof generates 17.9 kWh of green electricity per square metre of living space. This is fed into the public electricity grid and thus reduces the CO2 emissions of the fossil district heating supply by 50 percent in purely mathematical terms. In balance sheet terms, the building is therefore a zero-emissions house. Following the refurbishment, the energy efficiency of the Ludwigsfeld prefabricated building will improve from the energy efficiency midfield C to the ambitious new-build level A+. The primary energy requirement and CO2 emissions will be reduced by around 65 percent.

Mehrstöckiges Wohngebäude mit beige Fassade und vielen Fenstern, davor ein kleiner Gartenbereich mit Bäumen, Sträuchern, einer Pferdeskulptur und Gehwegen.

Scaling as a restructuring turbo

With around 650,000 residential units, the WBS 70 is the most frequently built type of prefabricated building in the GDR. As prefabricated buildings were already planned according to the principles of serial and modular prefabrication and built in large panel construction, they are ideally suited for serial refurbishment. The compact structure of the predominantly five to six-storey buildings and the predefined façade grid of 6 x 2.80 metres offer the best conditions. The serial refurbishment solution developed for the WBS 70 prefabricated building in Ludwigsfelde can also be transferred to the P2 prefabricated building type and the QP series and can therefore bring more than 50 percent of the East German prefabricated building stock onto a climate-friendly course. With a large number of uniform buildings, cost-reducing scaling effects take effect more quickly and on a completely different scale. The project in Ludwigsfelde can therefore have a catalysing effect that raises the serial refurbishment market as a whole to a new level.