European battle continues over 2030 energy efficiency target

Members of the European Parliament’s environment committee have voted for a legally binding target of a 40 per cent increase in energy efficiency by 2030, as well as for the closing of a number of loopholes that undermine annual energy savings.

A version of this was published first on The Fifth Estate on 11 September.

In doing so they have set a challenge to the disappointing compromise of 30% delivered by EU energy ministers in June – a non-binding target.

Will the EU eventually settle on a 30% or  40% target when it votes later this year? Battle is raging in Brussels between lobbyists of differing persuasions. It is particularly the coal industries of eastern European countries who are most vociferous in arguing for low targets.

You can tell your Member of the European Parliament what you want them to do by writing to them. Find out who they are here.

The environment committee wants to see Europe's nations being much more ambitious on saving energy in order to reach the Paris Agreement targets. They want to see a change in the text of the redrafted Energy Efficiency Directive from:

"Member States should set their national indicative energy efficiency contributions taking into account that the Union’s 2030 energy consumption has to be no more than 1321 Mtoe [million tonnes of oil equivalent] of primary energy and no more than 987 Mtoe of final energy."

to:

"Member States should set their national binding energy efficiency targets taking into account that the Union’s 2030 energy consumption has to be no more than 1129 Mtoe of primary energy and no more than 825 Mtoe of final energy."

This would represent a saving of 162 Mtoe – or 1884 million megawatt-hours of final energy use.

That’s equivalent to the output of 129,041MW of coal-fired power stations operating at a capacity factor of 60 per cent!

Seen in this way, it’s easy to understand the importance of this battle that is raging between the leaders of European countries and their environmentally inclined  MEPs.

Because of their concern that extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floods and droughts are expected to affect many parts of Europe more frequently, the environment committee also called for cities to create their own sets of targets for addressing climate change.

These would represent a system of Locally Determined Contributions, directly linked and complementary to their host countries’ National Determined Contributions, which are what every country has to produce to detail how it will help to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.

Target low-income households

Buildings constitute a substantial potential for increasing energy efficiency and the buildings sector accounts for 40 per cent of Europe’s energy consumption, making it a sector of prioritised importance for achieving further substantial energy efficiency gains.

The MEPs said they wanted a significant share of the 40 per cent energy efficiency target to be aimed as a priority at improvements to the energy efficiency of buildings that particularly benefit low-income consumers at risk of energy poverty, because they won’t have the means to make the necessary investments themselves.

“Investments in households at risk of energy poverty will reap significant benefits for those households and wider society,” they said. “With around 50 million households in the Union being affected by energy poverty, energy efficiency measures must be central to any cost-effective strategy to address energy poverty and consumer vulnerability and are complementary to social security policies at the Member State level.”

One loophole MEPs want closed is to let Member States have the discretion to decide how best to design measures providing better feedback on energy consumption for occupants of units in multi-apartment or multi-purpose buildings who are supplied with heating, cooling or hot water from a central source.

MEPs also ramped up the target for publicly owned buildings. They want to see three per cent of publicly owned buildings over 250 square metres to be eco-renovated a year – up from the current draft’s target of three per cent of central government-owned buildings over 500 square metres.

Even more crucially, they want to see sales of energy used in transport to be fully included in the targets.

Energy performance of buildings

The committee also called for a strengthening of the new Directive on the Energy Performance of Buildings to ramp up the current slow annual renovation rate of European buildings (around 0.4-1.2 per cent depending on the Member State).

Currently, there is an urgent need for widely available financing products that would include and support the positive aspects of energy efficiency renovations, such as the higher asset value and healthier living conditions for the occupants.

If adopted, this would call upon Member States to establish a long-term strategy for mobilising investment in the renovation of residential and commercial buildings, both public and private, to decarbonise the total building stock by 2050.

Spanish energy firm Iberdrola’s director of climate change, Gonzalo Saenz de Miera, has said his company would support this target by “improving the insulation on windows that will reduce the consumption of gas, or by improving the efficiency in the transport sector”.

“We’re not going to provide insulation services ourselves. Energy efficiency businesses will sell their services to companies that are obliged to make the reductions” and make those available using a system of white certificates, he said.

The next step in the European legislative process will be taken on 28 November when MEPs in the energy and industry committee are due to consider it.

Dora Petroula, energy savings policy coordinator at Climate Action Network Europe, commented: “This position brings us much closer to meeting the Paris Agreement goals which require the EU to up its game on energy efficiency. The industry committee needs to follow suit and support a 40 per cent efficiency target and a strong set of rules to ensure all EU countries limit energy waste.”

David Thorpe is the author of Energy Management in Building and Sustainable Home Refurbishment.