Germany, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands presented the other EU Member States with a non-paper dated 4 October outlining their expectations for the revision of the EU Directive (2018/844) on the energy performance of buildings directive (EPBD).
This document comes as the Czech Presidency of the EU Council submitted a new draft compromise to national delegations on 30 September with a view to reaching a political agreement (‘general approach’).
The four Member States behind the text stress that the revision of the EPBD should support the acceleration of the “renovation rate of existing buildings” in order to make the EU more energy independent.
In their view, lowering the ambitions of minimum energy performance standards “cannot be the right answer to the current geopolitical crisis and the aims of the European Green Deal”.
In order to find the right balance between ambition and flexibility, the four countries call for maintaining the Commission’s proposed categorisation approach for non-residential buildings (each category corresponds to a certain level of energy performance).
However, they propose to apply the Prague proposal - setting two different thresholds so that 15% and 25% of the national building stock respectively are above these thresholds (see EUROPE 12994/20) - for each category, “so that 15/25% of each building category have to be renovated and not for instance all hospitals with a high energy need in the first place”.
For residential buildings, they are ready to accept an approach whereby minimum energy performance standards set at Member State level would be based on a national trajectory that would oblige them to meet a certain average energy performance or greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction of their residential building stock, provided that Member States are able to demonstrate the achievement of intermediate target points in 2030 and 2040.
“This should be proven by equal and verifiable parameters (...) and not the energy performance certificate (EPC) classes anymore, because these classes have different meanings in each country today and will lead to an uneven renovation effort in each Member State”, the text says.
The four countries also support the Presidency’s proposal to introduce two “fixed checkpoints” in 2033 and 2040 on the national building renovation trajectories set by Member States (see EUROPE 13025/3). However, they would like this approach not to be based on EPC classes.
They also call for the possibility for Member States to add criteria based on operational GHG emissions and other energy performance indicators when setting minimum energy performance standards, provided that they can demonstrate to the Commission that these indicators lead to the same level of ambition.
See the non-paper: https://aeur.eu/f/3io
See the new draft compromise of the Czech Presidency: https://aeur.eu/f/3ip (Original version in French by Damien Genicot)