Industrial audits – the first in a new series of eceee policy guides

(eceee news, 4 Dec 2014) eceee today launched a policy guide on industrial audits. This guide is the first in a series of eceee policy guides on topical energy efficiency issues, intended for policy makers and decision makers in the public and private sectors. The guides are condensed and popular syntheses of the vast body of evidence-based knowledge on energy efficiency found in eceee proceedings and other scientific literature.

Industrial energy efficiency policy is at a crossroads. On the one hand it promises a win-win benefit for companies – both energy and cost savings. But on the other it is proving very difficult to deliver on those promises in real markets at the scale that we need to meet climate change targets. Governments across the world are reviewing their programmes to try to address this dilemma. The energy efficiency directive’s requirement for industrial audits has put renewed focus on this topic.

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Over the past 20 years, working with the energy efficiency community, eceee has built up a significant evidence base of practical energy efficiency policies and measures. The time has come to put this resource to work to help policymakers across the EU come to grips with energy efficiency.

Policy makers require multidisciplinary skills and credible information to develop and implement ambitious and sustainable energy policies and plans, especially in light of scarce funding and other government priorities. Therefore in 2014 the eceee began a “mining and refinement activity” in order to extract and synthesise the vast body of knowledge into practical, targeted information on how to implement energy savings.

One of the key outcomes of this work is a series of energy efficiency “user guides”. These guides act as primers for policymakers thinking of developing energy efficiency policies and programmes, and a signposting document for those wanting to dig deeper into the subject.

The objectives of these guides are:

  • To allow policy makers at the national, regional and local levels to access a wide body of evidence-based knowledge on effective policies and programmes
  • To present this information in a way that is accessible and understandable to policymakers and the actors that government programmes affect and influence
  • To allow policymakers to benchmark their policies and programmes against successful programmes operating in similar jurisdictions
  • To provide the raw material for policymakers starting from scratch to develop and implement their own programmes
  • To provide source references that researchers and policy analysts can follow up with more detailed study or fact-checking

We hope the guides will be useful. But it is important to point out that these guides are just that – guides. They are not instruction books or blueprints because each programme needs to fit with the circumstances of the relevant country or sector. Wherever possible we have tried to point the reader towards a richer literature to get them started on the nuts and bolts of programme development.

Download guide here