How Europe can deliver on energy efficiency

Author:
Jan Rosenow and Edith Bayer

The European Commission’s recently released Clean Energy Package, has a 2030 target of 30% energy savings. An important policy instrument to deliver these are Energy Efficiency Obligation (EEO) schemes. According to new research from the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP), not only are EEOs a highly cost-effective way to deliver energy efficiency, over the long term they can deliver consumer savings worth more than 4 times the costs of meeting the EEOs. But this only becomes apparent when a full evaluation is made. Most impact assessments carried out in Europe fail to take the full picture into account, thereby sending misleading messages.

2017 will be a big year for European energy policy, as the legislative proposals in the European Commission’s recently released ‘Winter Package’ are negotiated in the European Council and Parliament and shape the policy framework post-2020. Included in the package is the review of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) (2012/27/EU), which was introduced in 2012 to deliver a cut of 20 percent of energy consumption by 2020.

The article's full-text is available here.

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