Energy savings and efficiency have become central topics in the last years, having faced multiple crises, this has made us reconsider how we consume energy individually and globally. When we look at the European Green Deal, the EU is clearly increasing its climate ambition and aims at becoming the first climate-neutral continent by 2050.
Article 7 of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) is a key element of the European Union’s Fit for 55 Package. To meet the EU’s 55% net emissions reduction target and addressing energy poverty, national energy efficiency policy measures will be essential complements to EU law, such as eco-design and carbon pricing regulations.
With the EED recast, Article 7 will soon become Article 8, and will keep requiring Member States to achieve final energy savings. The changes brought by the EED recast are under final negotiations. What is clear already is that, likely from 2024 on, the rate of energy savings required will significantly increase, a share of these savings will need to be delivered amongst energy poor households (or other priority groups), and savings from new fossil fuel technologies would be excluded.
This means that Member States will need to ramp up the ambition of their policy measures, target specific end-users and shift the focus of technology support towards low carbon options. These ambitious changes are entirely consistent with the 55% target, the EU Green Deal and the Renovation Wave, but they are also challenging. To meet these challenges, they can build on successes of the first Art.7 EED obligation period (2014-2020) and continue to improve evaluation, measurement and verification (EM&V) practices to provide confidence in the impacts of policy measures.
This is why the ENSMOV Plus project will therefore play a central role by helping Member States to better navigate policy development, implementation and evaluation, and to learn from each other. This will be done through experience sharing activities and resources tailored to the achievement of Article 7 EED objectives. Launched in December 2022, ENSMOV Plus is a three-year European project of the LIFE programme and builds on the previous ENSMOV project with a strong consortium which includes national energy agencies, national associations of stakeholders and research institutes from 12 Member States: Austria, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Slovenia.
“Based on the Commission’s report on the achievement of the 2020 energy efficiency targets, 21 Member States achieved their headline target in terms of final energy consumption not to exceed in 2020. And the EU headline energy efficiency target for 2020 was achieved. But this was partly due to COVID and the resulting lower energy demand.” Says Jean-Sébastien Broc, coordinator of ENSMOV Plus at IEECP.
“The picture is even more mixed when looking at the Article 7 target about cumulative energy savings over 2014-2020: 14 Member States met their energy savings, with seven of them overachieving their target by more than 20% (and even sometimes by more than 50%). Whereas ten other Member States did not meet their energy savings obligation, with five of them missing their target by 25% or more. The over-achievements show that doing more is feasible, whereas the under-achievements remind us that not all policies have been successful. Every country and stakeholder can learn from what happened in other countries, provided that experience is analysed and discussed. This is what ENSMOV and now ENSMOV plus is doing. In addition to make state-of-the-art knowledge easy to find and acquire, the project provides a unique forum for public bodies and private stakeholders from all EU27 countries to exchange.”
National authorities and market stakeholders have welcomed the opportunity to share experiences, discuss about challenges and solutions related to energy efficiency obligation schemes (EEOSs) and alternative measures. The previous ENSMOV project organised more than 100 events (EU & regional workshops, webinars and national meetings) gathering altogether more than 1500 unique participants.
ENSMOV Plus will provide solutions to facilitate and expand sharing of knowledge and experience amongst Member States for the implementation of policies under Art.7 EED, and will further develop the their knowledge transfer platform https://energysavingpolicies.eu/.
Contact Person:
Axelle Gallerand, Communication lead
+33 640 606 673
