The European Horizon 2020-project COMBI ("Calculating and Operationalising the Multiple Benefits of Energy Efficiency in Europe") aims at estimating the energy and non-energy impacts that a realisation of the EU energy efficiency potential would have in the year 2030. The project goal is to cover the most important technical potentials identified for the EU27 by 2030 and to come up with consistent estimates for the most relevant impacts: air pollution (and its effects on human health, eco-systems/crops, buildings), social welfare (including disposable income, comfort, health and productivity), biotic and abiotic resources, the energy system and energy security and the macro economy (employment, economic growth and the public budget). This paper describes the overall project research design, envisaged methodologies, the most critical methodological challenges with such an ex-ante evaluation and with aggregating the multiple impacts. The project collects data for a set of 30 energy efficiency improvement actions grouped by energy services covering all sectors and EU countries. Based on this, multiple impacts will be quantified with separate methodological approaches, following methods used in the respective literature and developing them where necessary. The paper outlines the approaches taken by COMBI: socio-economic modelling for air pollution and social welfare, resource modelling for biotic/abiotic and economically unused resources, General Equilibrium modelling for long-run macroeconomic effects and other models for short-run effects, and the LEAP model for energy system modelling. Finally, impacts will be aggregated, where possible in monetary terms. Specific challenges of this step include double-counting issues, metrics, within and cross-country/regional variability of effects and context-specificity.
Energy efficiency improvements have numerous benefits/impacts additional to energy and greenhouse gas savings, as has been shown and analysed e.g. in the 2014 IEA Report on "Multiple Benefits of Energy Efficiency". This paper presents the Horizon 2020-project COMBI ("Calculating and Operationalising the Multiple Benefits of Energy Efficiency in Europe"), aiming at calculating the energy and non-energy impacts that a realisation of the EU energy efficiency potential would have in 2030. The project covers the most relevant technical energy efficiency improvement actions and estimates impacts of reduced air pollution (and its effects on human health, eco-systems/crops, buildings), improved social welfare (incl. disposable income, comfort, health, productivity), saved biotic and abiotic resources, and energy system, energy security, and the macroeconomy (employment, economic growth and public budget). This paper explains how the COMBI energy savings potential in the EU 2030 is being modelled and how multiple impacts are assessed. We outline main challenges with the quantification (choice of baseline scenario, additionality of savings and impacts, context dependency and distributional issues) as well as with the aggregation of impacts (e.g. interactions and overlaps) and how the project deals with them. As research is still ongoing, this paper only gives a first impression of the order of magnitude for additional multiple impacts of energy efficiency improvements may have in Europe, where this is available to date. The paper is intended to stimulate discussion and receive feedback from the academic community on quantification approaches followed by the project.
Improvements in energy efficiency have numerous impacts additional to energy and greenhouse gas savings. This paper presents key findings and policy recommendations of the COMBI project ("Calculating and Operationalising the Multiple Benefits of Energy Efficiency in Europe").
This project aimed at quantifying the energy and non-energy impacts that a realisation of the EU energy efficiency potential would have in 2030. It covered the most relevant technical energy efficiency improvement actions in buildings, transport and industry.
Quantified impacts include reduced air pollution (and its effects on human health, eco-systems), improved social welfare (health, productivity), saved biotic and abiotic resources, effects on the energy system and energy security, and the economy (employment, GDP, public budgets and energy/EU-ETS prices). The paper shows that a more ambitious energy efficiency policy in Europe would lead to substantial impacts: overall, in 2030 alone, monetized multiple impacts (MI) would amount to 61 bn Euros per year in 2030, i.e. corresponding to approx. 50% of energy cost savings (131 bn Euros).
Consequently, the conservative CBA approach of COMBI yields that including MI quantifications to energy efficiency impact assessments would increase the benefit side by at least 50-70%. As this analysis excludes numerous impacts that could either not be quantified or monetized or where any double-counting potential exists, actual benefits may be much larger.
Based on these findings, the paper formulates several recommendations for EU policy making:
(1) the inclusion of MI into the assessment of policy instruments and scenarios,
(2) the need of reliable MI quantifications for policy design and target setting,
(3) the use of MI for encouraging inter-departmental and cross-sectoral cooperation in policy making to pursue common goals, and
(4) the importance of MI evaluations for their communication and promotion to decision-makers, stakeholders, investors and the general public.
The core objective of Energy Efficiency Watch 3 (EEW3) is to establish a constant feedback loop on the implementation of European and national energy efficiency policies and thus enable both compliance monitoring and mutual learning on effective policy making across the EU. The project team applied a mixed-method approach to assess energy efficiency policy developments in EU Member States. It analysed progress of national policies by screening official documents, sought experts' knowledge via an EU-wide survey and has been creating new consultation platforms with a wide spectrum of stakeholders including parliamentarians, regions, cities and business stakeholders. Analysis of the National Energy Efficiency Action Plans (NEEAPs), the expert survey with input from over 1,100 experts on policy ambition and progress in each Member State, as well as 28 Country Reports have been central elements in EEW3. This paper will present the main conclusions and policy recommendations of EEW3. In doing so, it will first summarise the findings of the document analysis based on the 28 Country Reports, showing developments of energy efficiency policies since the second NEEAP in 2011 in a cross-country overview for six sectors. These findings are then contrasted with the experts' perspective on progress in energy efficiency policies in their countries as collected in the EEW survey. Moreover, ten case studies of good practice energy efficiency policies are shown, three of them will be presented in more detail. The paper ends with key policy conclusions for improving the effectiveness of European energy efficiency policies. A key finding is that policy implementation has improved a lot since 2011 but more is needed to achieve the EED Art. 7 and other targets.