Will ESD reporting using bottom-up energy savings calculations be a nightmare or the next step in a better understanding of national energy savings?

Panel: Panel 3. Monitoring & evaluation: understanding change and how to deliver energy efficiency

Authors:
Harry Vreuls, SenterNovem, The Netherlands
Stefan Thomas, Wuppertal Institute for Climate Environment Energy, Germany
Jean-Sébastien Broc, École des Mines de Nantes, France
Dick Both, SenterNovem, The Netherlands

Abstract

The ESD (Energy Services Directive) requires that EU Member States increase their use of bottom-up energy savings calculations to report on the results of their energy efficiency policies. To make the results more comparable over the Member States harmonised methods should be developed and improved. The first experiences with this harmonisation process from the EMEEES project are presented in this paper. It starts with the introduction of the areas that could be dealt with in the harmonisation: the policies and measures, the individual appliances and installations and the aggregation level of a building, a company or an organisation. Each of them has its own characteristics and complexity to handle with. Some case applications (Voluntary Agreements, Energy Audits, Boilers and Building envelope of existing buildings) for bottom up energy savings calculations are presented to illustrate this. But if harmonisation should be realised for all these levels and economic sectors (industry, agriculture, transport, commercial and non-commercial services and households) it would results in thousands of pages with instructions. This would be a nightmare, but is there another way to reach improved harmonisation? The paper argues on what key elements the harmonisation should concentrate: a general structure for documentation of bottom-up energy savings, the selection of baseline and baseline parameters, and a dynamic approach to ensure improvement over time.