The call from the bank advisor on Tuesday morning was quite smug.

He asked the unsuspecting customer whether the bad news from the previous day had already gotten through.

The federal government unexpectedly stopped state funding for energy-efficient building refurbishment on Monday morning.

At the time, the bank employee had tried several times to submit the application to the state development bank KfW and had failed for unknown reasons.

It was not until an hour later that he got the message that there was no technical fault, as suspected, but that KfW had basically closed the bulkheads.

You can't explain it at all, he said apologetically, he had never experienced anything like it.

Nobody expected the complete stop, almost overnight,

For thousands of customers, this means: the week-long toil of applying, the endless scraping together of countless documents, the hours of working through complicated application requirements - all for nothing.

No subsidized loans at low interest rates, no state subsidies - and that for a project that is actually particularly important to the state under the leadership of the new traffic light government: the insulation of old buildings.

The case of the initially unsuspecting and now very clueless customer is certainly not an isolated case: almost 24,000 applicants are currently in limbo, 22,000 of them private households.

You could still submit applications, but for the time being there is no money left.

20,200 applications are for new buildings according to the KfW efficiency house standard 55, 3000 for new buildings according to the even more economical standard 40. Around 700 applications relate to comprehensive renovations of older buildings.

In addition, there is the unknown number of those who have not yet submitted an application for their own construction project, but who had already planned loans and grants from KfW in their financing.

There should be new programs "as soon as possible" for renovations in particular, but also for the Efficiency House 40.

Consequences are still unclear

Anyone who builds an Efficiency House 55, on the other hand, will probably get nothing - in the opinion of the federal government, this type of building is now standard and no longer requires funding. Those affected are now to be offered loans from KfW. Habeck also calculated the amounts involved: for 2022, 5 billion euros were available for the KfW building programs as part of the preliminary budget management. 3.2 billion euros had already been approved by the time the application was stopped. That leaves 1.8 billion euros. The 24,000 applications that are still open add up to 7.2 billion. KfW has stopped three popular programs to promote energy-efficient houses: "Efficiency House 55", "Efficiency House 40" and "Energetic Refurbishment" - a program that does not support new construction, but does support refurbishment. The numbers meanthat the newly built house uses only 55 or 40 percent primary energy compared to a conventional reference building. As of January 24, the state-owned bank stopped accepting applications for subsidies.