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Publications - Paper

The need for harmonization in Energy Efficiency policies: building a taxonomy for European industry

Publications - Paper

The need for harmonization in Energy Efficiency policies: building a taxonomy for European industry

The presentation outlines the results obtained from the EU-MERCI project for which RSE was the coordinator on the harmonization of European energy efficiency policies.

The EE Directive 2012/27/EU (EED) [EED1 2012] and its update with Directive 2018/2002/EU [EED2 2018] were the starting point for the development and updating of EE (EE) laws and regulations in all European Union (EU) member states. In addition,

CO2 emissions reduction targets for 2020 and 2030 have steered member states toward stricter regulations on energy production and consumption. However, the implementation of the EED is not uniform across the different ‘member states,’ and large differences persist in how national policymakers are responding to meeting emission reduction targets. Harmonization across ‘different countries’ is therefore a major challenge. The EU-MERCI project (an acronym for ‘EU coordinated MEthods and procedures based on Real Cases for the effective implementation of policies and measures supporting energy efficiency in the Industry’), funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 program (Grant Agreement No 693845), attempts to address these problems by developing a methodology to harmonize data from EE projects funded in different member states. This methodology can be used as a basis for all EE policies and regulations across the EU and is a key tool of the project, as it has enabled the construction of the main products of the project, which are the database and platform EU-MERCI.

In addition, by highlighting the initial culture in aligning data on implemented projects incentivized through different policies in different member states, this paper describes the proposed harmonization methodology, which includes a detailed ‘taxonomy’ developed by EU-MERCI partners to allocate EE projects into predefined categories and to easily perform both statistical analysis of nearly 3,000 records collected and the extraction of energy efficiency ‘Best Practices’ in EU industry. The paper is concluded by a discussion on integrating the methodology into local policies.

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