Dutch AI Tool Cuts Through One Trillion Home Renovation Choices to Help Homeowners Go Green
Eindhoven, Monday, 1 June 2026.
A TU/e-built AI tool, launching June 4, 2026, analyzes over one trillion renovation combinations to guide Dutch homeowners toward smarter, greener upgrades — backed by €3 million in government funding.
Eight Years in the Making
The story of the Renovation Explorer begins not in a laboratory, but around a negotiating table. In 2018, during the Dutch national climate agreement negotiations, Lisanne Havinga — now an Assistant Professor in the Building Performance group in the Department of Built Environment at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) — was asked a deceptively simple question: what would it take to ensure that 100,000 proposed home renovations are both cost-effective and high quality? [1] The answer, it turned out, would take nearly eight years, two prototypes, a €3 million government grant, and a team of researchers to properly construct. [1]
One Trillion Choices, One Personalized Answer
At the core of the Renovation Explorer lies a technical architecture that is as ambitious as the problem it aims to solve. The tool deploys a dynamic machine learning model trained on 350,000 scenarios, grounded in building physics principles such as heat transfer. [1] From this foundation, it is capable of analyzing over one trillion personalized renovation packages, each tailored to a home’s specific heating systems, structural characteristics, and the dynamic behavior of the household living within it. [1] This is not a generic checklist — it is a precision instrument.
Open Source and Scaled for the Nation
The Renovation Explorer Congress, scheduled for Thursday, June 4, 2026, from 10:00 to 15:00 at the TU/e Campus in Eindhoven, marks the official public launch of the tool — including the release of its open-source version. [1] Havinga has been unambiguous about the philosophy driving this decision: “The scripts need to be available for other developers so that they can create their own custom implementations based on the Renovation Explorer. This tool just must be open source and the development of it must not be commercialized.” [1] The congress will feature a live software demonstration and is designed to present the tool to key stakeholder groups. [1] Loonen described the event as “the perfect opportunity to demonstrate this tool to the key stakeholder groups,” underscoring the significance of the occasion. [1]