The European Commission announced on Thursday 16 December the publication of a proposal for a delegated act to establish a methodology for calculating the amount of renewable cooling and district cooling that can be counted towards the EU’s renewable energy targets.
By clarifying how to account for the contribution of cooling to a Member State’s overall renewable energy target as well as how it contributes to the sectoral targets for heating and cooling and district heating and cooling, the delegated act should fill a gap in the current legislation.
Until now, the contribution of cooling to renewable energy could not be calculated in practice.
Yet cooling now accounts for between 5 and 20% of final energy consumption in some EU countries.
The new methodology introduces a progressive system with two thresholds: cooling systems below the lower threshold will not be recognised as renewable, while cooling from systems at or above the upper threshold will be fully recognised as renewable.
Cooling systems between the two thresholds will be able to credit a linearly increasing amount of cooling as renewable energy, as their efficiency approaches the upper threshold.
The European Parliament and the Council of the EU have 2 months to examine the delegated act and potentially oppose it.
See the delegated act: https://bit.ly/3GOC6QQ (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)