The European Alliance to Save Energy (EU-ASE) has ramped up the rhetoric ahead of the European Commission’s energy efficiency legislation release next month.
The Commission will present its revisions to the Energy Efficiency (EED) and Energy Performance of Buildings Directives (EPBD) on 30 November, and EU-ASE has this week increased its calls for a “strong legislative framework”, claiming that the continued adoption of the current 27% target would “merely slow down the current rate of energy productivity in the EU”.
The trade association, which represents manufacturers such as Knauf, Phillips, Siemens and Kingspan, earlier this year coordinated a letter addressed to EC president Jean-Claude Juncker demanding more ambitious energy efficiency targets “well above the current non-binding 27%”.
EU-ASE has now followed this up by publishing a collection of 16 case studies in which companies have made strategic investments in energy efficiency, which it says has been designed to provide European policy makers with facts and figures on the benefits of energy efficient materials and buildings.
The document includes details relating to projects at locations including Danfoss’ technology centre in Hamburg, Germany; a Facebook data centre in Luleaa, Sweden; Kingspan’s facility in Selby, England; and Deloitte’s offices in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Earlier this year reports emerged that the European Commission is to set a more ambitious energy efficiency target of 30% by 2030, and at the launch of the publication Jyrki Katainen, VP of the European Commission, said the Commission needed to be “creative and wise” when it came to regulatory schemes to bolster energy efficiency.
“We still have a long way to go on increasing the very low renovation rate. There is an interest in addressing accounting barriers and together with Eurostat we are working on that,” he said.
Meanwhile Monica Frassoni, president at EU-ASE, said: “An ambitious and correct EU policy framework to put ‘Efficiency First’ among European priority investments post-2020 can be properly designed only if there is a widespread awareness of energy efficiency technologies and services, their impacts and multiple collective benefits”.
